


healing comes in the form of some kind of celebration (so this is what moving on feels like)

by kwritten



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Wells Jaha Lives, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-05-11 02:45:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5610937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Wells-is-alive universe. Expect canon to shift. </p><p> </p><p>  <i>When he climbed down the ladder he could have been emerging from hell or entering it, it didn’t seem to matter anymore, the storm is over and Raven Reyes was sitting next to Wells singing softly a tune he felt might be familiar if only he could pick out the words. He crept closer, drawn in by the sound of her husky voice, desperate for comfort even if he was just leeching it from someone else who probably needed it more. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue (meeting you, hating you, it all had to come first)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MarauderCracker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/gifts).



> no beta, all mistakes mine
> 
> ch2 is completed and just need a good read-through/edit and then it will be posted! sorry I didn't manage to ~complete this before posting day :(

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There were, he was learning, a very subtle difference between all of them. _We are who we need to be to survive,_ wasn’t exactly the end of the story, it was the beginning. There was also the person you needed to be to maintain control. The person you needed to be to prove you had power when you were pretty sure there was none left to take.  
>  The person you needed to be to protect the people standing next to you.  
> He knew the shoes he was wearing didn’t fit well, but in a room full of people haunted by a ghost they thought they could stop from coming into being, there were only a few options left.

She didn’t ask to be born. 

That’s the first thing. 

She did, however, _demand to live_. 

Falling to the ground in a tin can whooping and laughing wasn’t a birth and it certainly wasn’t a fucking baptism by fire. That’s what they’d like to think, that she was grasping at redemption or a better way or a reason to live. She didn’t need those things. Rushing headlong into the unknown, her life in her hands, held loosely as if she could afford to lose it, wasn’t a death wish. 

Life was her mandate. 

 

Charlotte dying changed everything and changed nothing. Finn dying darkened the shadows under Clarke’s eyes and darkened the shadows in the trees. Atom dying proved he wasn’t what he needed to be and wasn’t what they wanted him to be. Jasper screaming in the night brought fear into the camp and didn’t frighten everyone. The two graves that Wells dug on the first day set a precedent and didn’t presume a pattern. 

Killing Jaha to get to the Ground only to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his son every god damn day proved what he was willing to do and proved absolutely fucking nothing whatsoever except that they both seemed damned better at keeping secrets than anyone would ever give them credit for. Bellamy’s secret was in the roll of his hips, in the girls in his tent, in his voice barking out orders without hesitation. Wells’ secret was in his steady shoulders, in his straight spine, in his clear eyes, in his crooked smile. 

It was the same secret, _sorry about your father, sorry about your mother, sorry about being your enemy, sorry about the world we were handed_. 

The bodies were piling up around him and he’d never dig his way out of it. 

When the ball of flame came tearing out of the sky he was sitting between them, Octavia on his right, Clarke and Wells on his left, their secrets hanging heavy over their heads. (Or maybe he was alone, pretending to enjoy the company of a girl with no name and aspirations he didn’t want to understand, maybe they were yards away but he never remembered it that way.) Did they know then the secrets they carried? Could they see them in each other’s eyes? 

The bodies were piling up around him and he’d never dig his way out of it, but at least he’d be free. 

When the ball of flame came tearing out of the sky he was sitting in the middle of his own kingdom, looking up at the stars instead of down at the earth. And it didn’t matter if the instinct for destruction came from a desire to keep that kingdom intact or to protect Octavia. There was no difference anymore. 

_His sister, his responsibility._

His war. 

 

When she opened her eyes everything was green and there were a pair of brown eyes in a freckled face staring at her, there was a ringing in her ears that made the whole world seem like it was spinning. 

She’d remember that face, those eyes exposed and full of so many things that she’d spent most of her life trying to hide. 

They fought next and everything was broken before she was told that she’d never be whole again. There would never be time to mourn, time to sit upon the fresh dirt and scream, first there was a hand on her throat and a knife in her hand and then there was a scramble to save the world. 

She never asked to be a hero, it didn’t suit her. 

_Keep your wings, I’m no angel_ , she should have said. Except that there wasn’t a prince charming at the end of the road and a girl’s gotta keep busy. 

 

Okay so there wasn’t a war, just a scuffle in the dirt, a knife where there shouldn’t be one and a pair of brown eyes daring him, daring him, daring him and lips exposing his secret with a laugh and hair tumbling around his face when she pounced and tears because there were always tears. 

There’s no death without crying, there’s no battle without a little broken skin. 

He grabbed the radio and ran. 

Probably should have thought it through. 

Probably should have had a plan that was better than _run run run_ and _smash_. 

Girls that come tumbling out of the sky shouldn’t be able to run that fast or hit that hard. 

Turned out smashing the whole world wouldn’t stop the death count from increasing. 

Turned out running and smashing and shouting and holding a throat in his hand didn’t make him the killer that he wanted them to think that he was. 

The bullet still missed, he’s as innocent as he was guilty. 

Time to save the world. 

 

“Is it always like this around here,” Raven sat down with a sigh and shoved Wells gently with her elbow. There was a weariness about her voice that suggested it wasn’t a question. She usually didn’t have time for the answer or had already found it on her own before you even realized what she was really asking. Everything about Raven was a question, she was just never the one asking them and the answers were more slippery than they had any right to be. 

Wells looked gloomily out at the crowd of delinquents gathered around a large bonfire a few yards away. “I’m sorry,” he answered softly. 

_Does every day on the ground include a burial?_

“No,” she interrupted, sharply, hard, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. “Don’t.”

“Raven…” A flash of blonde hair darted through the crowd and he stiffened, watching. 

She smiled at him and shook her head, “You ever tell her?”

He laughed, short, hard. She was rubbing off on him again, filling up his empty spaces with sharp corners. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re an idiot,” she stood up and he thought maybe this was a moment when he should take her hand or force her to deal with the body in the ground just a few paces away or show her how to be soft and she thought maybe this was a moment when she should let him take her hand.

She walked away and he let her go alone; to a dark corner to sleep alone or to the mound of freshly-turned dirt to cry alone. 

In the morning he’d regret not following, maybe. 

 

“My sister, my responsibility,” he muttered under his breath and just caught a glimpse of Wells chuckling to himself. “You have something to say, Chancellor?” he didn’t mean to be so harsh, didn’t mean to let his voice catch that gravely edge, except he also couldn’t care less if he did either. 

Wells turned his wide eyes on him, faced him squarely, the way he always did, feet planted solidly on the ground as if in anticipation of a punch. “Guess we got more in common than meets the eye,” there was a slight smirk to his lips and all Bellamy could do was smile crookedly in response. 

“They’ll be fine,” he said instinctively, before he could stop himself. He could feel his shoulders flex at the freedom and he barked out an order to Murphy before daring to glance back at Wells again. 

“No, they won’t,” Wells was exasperatingly honest, a part of him half a mile away with two girls traipsing through the forest as if they had been born there and had every right to it. 

_None of them ever were to begin with._

He blinked suddenly and reached out, “We’ll find her.” It was annoying how honest his lies were. He glanced back at the path where Clarke disappeared with Raven just seconds earlier. 

Bellamy nodded, “Then we need to get started.” He looked out into the dark forest in the direction of where Octavia had last been seen. 

_His sister, his responsibility._

 

Raven heard a voice screaming for Clarke’s name and she tried not to take it personally, tried not to reach around, pull out her cape, shove it in the Delinquents’ faces, and remind them who the hero was, remind them who risked fire to join them in death. (She never asked to be a hero. Which was probably for the best. She didn’t make a very good one.) In her pocket was a trinket from a boy she loved for a girl she’d never met, but he’s _in_ the ground and his new girl was standing beside her _on_ the ground. 

Maybe there really was a hell under the earth’s thin, fragile crust just like all the ancient stories say.

As a child she learned _in – on – under_ in a dark room they corralled all the other lost kids like her into – calling it a school, calling themselves teachers, calling her an error instead of acknowledging their own mistakes – making out shapes with her hands as if her skin could teach her heart what her mother’s forbidden lullabies had already sunk into her bones and blood, her thin voice warbling out a tune that tripped uncomfortably out of her lips, joining a chorus of timid voices. 

In (a finger held in her fist).   
On (a palm against her fist).  
Under (a fist hitting her knuckles).

The words clumsy on her tongue and a note of disapproval in the voices above her head, singing _in, on, under_ as if repetition will make the foreign words stick to the truths she already shouts by a nature they’d rather she denied.

There, her feet planted firmly in dirt, a canopy of trees high overhead, she sang to herself as she ran across the camp, feeling hopeless and helpless and feeling without seeing that whatever was waiting had the possibility to break her once again. 

In (a body surrounded by dirt never to rise again, never to smile, never to kiss).  
On (her feet pressing against dirt and grass and leaves and moss).  
Under (her body beneath the trees, the sky, the clouds, the atmosphere pressing down).

That it was Wells, bleeding and breathing harshly; that it was Wells, blood bright and reflective against his worn clothes; that it was the one thing she had left to hold onto – didn’t surprise her. Nothing could surprise her anymore. (She’d like to think that was true.)

“Can you save him?” 

_She never asked to be a hero._

“No – not me. I need my mom. I need to _talk_ to her.” 

_Morse Code wasn’t enough._

“There’s still no radio!”

_You weren’t enough._

“Raven? Fix it. Go.”

A girl’s gotta have something to do to pass the time. 

In (death).  
On (running, rushing, fighting, fixing, trying, scrambling).  
Under (failing.)

They lied, her teachers with their even tones and their pitying eyes and their impatience when her voice slipped into soft vowels and her tongue rolled in ways that theirs couldn’t. They lied. She stared down at the broken pieces of metal she’d gathered around her like a nest and swore because there was no one to hear and no one to see.

In.  
On.   
Under.   
There was nothing about fists and skin and knuckles in these words. 

She tried to find her mother’s words, but she’d pushed them all away and all that was left was a tune to a wordless song that she hated. 

She sang it anyway, to herself, as her fingers plucked at scraps and twisted wires. 

At least then, it was a lie she chose. 

 

There were too many bodies, they were piling up. And they all had his name splashed against their chest, where the others saw blood and betrayal and danger and stupidity and fear all he saw was the one thing he ever saw. 

_Your sister, your responsibility._

“Stop blaming me for your mistakes!” 

There was blood on her face and he longed to wipe it clean, to examine the wound, to pull her into his lap like he could when she was a child and fix it, just fix it, just fix everything. If he could have fixed the whole goddamn Ark so that she could walk free, he would have. Shot and killed every councilman, raged a war, anything to remain standing by her side. 

“So if Wells dies in there, that’s on you! Everything that’s gone wrong is because of you.”

She could talk a mile a minute and still have more to say. Maybe they kept her under the floorboards for too long, hushed her too often. Maybe the thing he did wrong wasn’t exposing her, but keeping her to himself for so long. Here, on the ground, her voice was loud and hard and filled the air. She could fill up space with just the sound of her voice and she had grown up under the floor. Maybe all this time she had just been waiting to expand. 

“You got me locked up on the Ark, you wanted me to go to that stupid dance. You got mom killed!”

She could fill up the air with just the sound of her voice and he drank it in like oxygen. All the words he screamed to himself inside his head in the dark of night, in every footstep that fell, in every moment that he breathed free air. 

He drank it in and pretended, for just a moment, that they weren’t his own thoughts coming out of her mouth. 

He leaned back, not as if he had been hit but as if he was gathering energy to pull the first punch. He smiled, could feel it twist his face in the way that the guards would smile at his mother or men like him, at people weaker than them. 

He leaned back and smiled and took the cowards way out. 

Cowards never want to admit when the truth is eating away at their bones. 

“Me? Mom was floated for having you. She’s dead _because_ you’re alive.” He could feel his spine shrinking inside of him, the bones collapsing on themselves, he could disappear this way. Would she notice? Did it matter? “That was _her_ choice.” 

Octavia’s face fell. 

“I didn’t have a choice.” There’s something about the green here that he suddenly despises. Something about the scent in the air that moments ago was crisp and clean and now feels like poison on his tongue. “My life _ended_ the day that you were born.”

His sister, his responsibility. 

Across camp, there was a boy bleeding out because he didn’t know how to care about anything but her, because he’d never had anything in the universe that meant as much as her, because he couldn’t separate safety from danger. Everything was a danger and keeping her safe was the singular fact of his world. 

So it was all his fault. 

The bodies lying in the ground, their shoes and clothes redistributed as if they’d been dead for years. Another boy that could die at any moment. Death surrounding him and beckoning to him as if he wasn’t already dead. 

He said it all wrong, he can see it on her face, he said all the right things and they were all wrong and he shouldn’t have said them anyway. He should have said, _I’d die for you, but I can’t expect everyone else to die along with me._ He should have said that she was his whole reason and his whole life. 

_My life ended the day that you were born._ It felt good to roll the words around on his tongue, to give them air and shape, to watch them slip out from between his lips and fall to the ground like stones. They weren’t the right words, but they were true. 

Siblings weren’t an anomaly, they were an impossibility. 

Maybe she shouldn’t have been the best mirror. Maybe they weren’t supposed to wear each other’s fears and anger like a second skin. Maybe they lived in too close of quarters, maybe they knew each other too well, maybe this is what having a sister was always like: burning down the whole goddamn world to make sure you were still at her side in the end. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” Her arm was warm and solid beneath his fingers and he nearly shouted a prayer because she’s not a mirage, she’s not a phantom, she’s alive she’s alive she’s alive and so many are not, too many are not. 

He’d laugh at the simplicity of his needs if he could only explain them to her. 

“You can’t keep me locked up in here forever,” she was angry and it felt like penance, her words whipping at him. She was angry and it felt like a balm. 

Anger was a sickness they could find a cure for together. 

_His sister, his responsibility._

 

There was only so much you could say by Morse Code. 

We’re alive.   
We’re dying. 

It was enough to stop death yesterday but not enough today. 

There was only so much you could say over a radio in the middle of a storm in a hunk of metal on the ground with kids crowding around your shoulders. 

“Calling Ark Station. Ark Station please come in. I’m on the ground with the hundred. We need you.”

And even when the voices began, they were voices and they brought no comfort. Only questions, questions, questions that someone else answered because she sat there frozen in place, wondering how to explain over the radio…

We’re alive.   
We’re dying. 

There’s a mound of dirt with no name on it but it belonged to someone that kissed her and smiled and laughed only days ago. There’s fear in the eyes of the children that flocked around each other and pretended to be adults. There were trees and trees and trees and rain. And the rain could kill and the trees hid dangers and monsters and shadows. 

Sure was pretty, though. 

We’re alive.   
We’re dying.   
We need you. 

Standing over the body of a boy that means something with a girl with voices in the air but no one to touch was a bit like skywalking. A bit like reaching out and knowing the only thing between you and oblivion was your own skin and it clung too tight to your bones. 

“He was my best friend,” she said when they met under the trees right before the running and the fighting and the scrambling began and never stopped. It didn’t matter which one. They both meant it. And then one of them said, “Hi. Nice to meet you,” as if that wasn’t odd. And then there they were not even two days later, watching him bleed and bleed and bleed, their heads bowed in unison, their fear tying them together, two storms raging overhead with outcomes that could break them in every possible way. 

In (we’re here).   
On (we need you).   
Under (don’t die). 

 

There were, he was learning, a very subtle difference between all of them. _We are who we need to be to survive,_ wasn’t exactly the end of the story, it was the beginning. There was also the person you needed to be to maintain control. The person you needed to be to prove you had power when you were pretty sure there was none left to take. 

The person you needed to be to protect the people standing next to you. 

He knew the shoes he was wearing didn’t fit well, but in a room full of people haunted by a ghost they thought they could stop from coming into being, there were only a few options left. 

The person that gives the order and stands by in silence.   
The person that picks up the whip and pretends to think this will help.   
The person that finds the one thing that will hurt most.   
The person that hurts themselves to prove that they have worth.  
The person that takes the hits until someone else is at stake. 

_This isn’t who we are.  
It is now._

He could scream into oblivion but it wouldn’t help matters any. He’s made his bed and it’s uncomfortable and too large and too small and he’s going to trip over the shoes he forced on his feet, and maybe he deserved it. 

He’ll never forget the feel of tension in his shoulders as he threw his whole body into the act of lashing out at a man tied up in front of him. The way that skin and bone and muscles give way if apply enough pressure. The way gravity bore down on him in between lashes, threatening to drive him deep into the ground. 

And he deserved it, the memories, the nightmares, the fear, the self-hatred. 

One day he’d look up and all that there’d be left to see in the mirror is a shell of a man that claimed to love and proved it with violence.

 

“I electrocuted a guy for you, dumbass, so you better wake up soon,” she held his hand and watched him sleep because the antidote was in his system and so she had nothing better to do but wait. 

He was going to ream her three ways from Sunday when he found out, all of his ideals and good intentions that he couldn’t hide from the day they met, sitting outside the Skybox on visiting day. She’d walked inside every time and every time he had waited until she got out, sat with her in silence for a while, but never went in himself. She’d waited three months before asking why and then laughed when he told her. 

“The girl in solitary? But she _can’t_ see you.”

“Can’t or won’t, I’m still coming every visiting day because she’d do the same for me.” He had paused and looked down at his hands, “She’s like a sister to me.”

Raven had laughed, “No one has a sister.”

Family wasn’t a choice. She knew that better than most. Love you could choose, family was the stone hanging around your neck. Girlfriend, wife, lover, friend. Anyone could be those things if they chose, if they deserved it, if they wanted it. 

He’d shrugged, “Family can be a choice. I choose Clarke.” And then they’d changed the subject, walked through the halls together like they’d known each other their whole lives, it had almost felt easy. 

A few weeks later, without context, she’d asked, “So tell me, dumbass, what’s a sister.”

“She’s… the person you come to visiting day for even if you can’t see her.”

“But not the person you fuck,” she’d meant it as a joke, but it fell flat in the air between them, like an insult that missed its mark.

“Like the person you sit in silence with when they are angry and there’s nothing you can do to fix it because she’s angry at you but walking away isn’t an option,” he’d said solemnly, like it was something that had happened recently enough that the feeling of it was pressing against his skin. 

She never pissed him off, didn’t want to test fate, didn’t want to see him walk away while she was anger and have the secret word in her chest that beat out _sister_ shift to _friend_ or _acquaintance_ or _nothing_ and be left alone again. She’d always been alone, she could take it. She’d just rather not. 

“Wake up so you can be pissed at me,” she whispered, watching Clarke sleep curled up in a ball in the corner, both of them united in the need to wait wait wait. 

_Wake up so I can sit with you in silence while you stay angry with me because I’m not walking away._

_You’re alive._  
You didn’t die.   
You needed me (this time). 

_And I was here._

 

The girl who gave the order for torture and sang a lullaby to a boy while killing him with mercy cried on the chest of the boy she saved. So much passive steel, so delicate to the touch. 

The girl who took a knife to her own skin in order to save another’s life refused comfort. So much heart, so much armor.

The girl who crashed to the earth and screamed as she held live wires to a stranger’s skin sang to the boy her desperation couldn’t save. So much fire, such a haunting song. 

When he climbed down the ladder he could have been emerging from hell or entering it, it didn’t seem to matter anymore, the storm is over and Raven Reyes was sitting next to Wells singing softly a tune he felt might be familiar if only he could pick out the words. He crept closer, drawn in by the sound of her husky voice, desperate for comfort even if he was just leeching it from someone else who probably needed it more. 

“That’s not English,” his voice sounded stupid to his own ears and he hoped that she couldn’t see his blush in the dim light. 

She chuckled a little, the words still flowing between her humor, the song still filling up the stale space between her and the boy whose hand she was holding. 

He took another step forward, “No one can speak two languages.”

She stopped and rolled her eyes, “Pretty sure I was singing, shooter.”

He wanted to hate the name, wanted to rip it from her, wanted to stomp it in the dust, but it wasn’t a lie and there were going to be a million moments when a lie felt better than the truth. _Shooter_ was a hell of a lot better than _Killer_ and after a day like today that almost felt like something good. 

“What does it mean?” He didn’t really want to know, not the words really, itemized and catalogued and losing everything that made them haunting and sweet and mysterious. What he wanted to ask was _How do you know them_ , but that felt like a conversation he didn’t have the right to have. 

“Just nonsense words that make no sense,” she grinned, it split her face and made her look like a different person. He liked her face like that. “My mom used to sing it when she was sober,” she shrugged absently, as if she was used to needing to brush off the words to make them mean less, “she was never sober long enough to explain it.”

And that said everything, didn’t it?

“I didn’t know there was anyone left on the Ark that could…” he took another step closer, he felt daring. He felt like the closer he got the less the day meant, the more he was disappearing into the bubble of sound she had created, the likelier it was that the whole world outside was just a nightmare. 

“I didn’t know anyone had a brother,” she didn’t say it with malice the way most people did, she had the face of a person that knew exactly what the word meant and wasn’t resentful about this thing that he couldn’t help himself from being. “There’s a lot of shit on the Ark they pretend doesn’t happen.”

He nodded silently. There had always been two Arks in his mind and after Octavia was taken away and their mother killed, it became more clear every day that there had always been two worlds coexisting in space: one where the secrets lived and the other where there were no secrets. 

“Can he understand?”

There were things that were more impossible than the Prince of the Ark knowing things he shouldn’t. 

“No,” her face softened, “But Finn did. I taught him when we were kids. Little things, but enough.”

_So that I didn’t feel alone._

He couldn’t imagine her being with the spacewalker, but it was the first thing out of her mouth once her feet touched the ground. _Where’s Finn?_ Her first loss on the ground. Their first murder on the ground. Just one mistake in a long list of mistakes with his name on them. 

He wanted to say, _I’m sorry_ , as if that would make anything better, but he couldn’t get the words to shape correctly on his tongue. _Sing it again_ , clambered against his throat no matter how many times he tried to swallow it down. 

“Could you two keep it down? There’s people tryin’ to sleep around here.”

Raven leapt up and clutched the hand already in hers tighter, “You scared the hell out of me, dick.” She was beaming down at Wells, finally something to celebrate. “Clarke! Wake the hell up!”

Clarke pushed herself against Bellamy to get close to the bed, “Hey… you’re awake!”

Wells blinked at her, “You fell _asleep_ while I was on my death bed?”

Raven smiled at them, “He’s feeling better.”

Bellamy moved to leave, feeling like an intruder, but Wells grabbed his arm, “Thanks, man.”

“I owed you one.”

Wells rolled his eyes and then turned back to Raven, his tone dropping almost to a whisper, “So was the cute little stoner sad that I was dying?”

Bellamy couldn’t help but smile when the two girls collapsed into giggles, Wells’ hand still gripping his arm. 

 

Raven held the two-headed deer Finn had made for Clarke in her fingers and scowled down at the pile of dirt in front of her, auspicious only because she knew what was underneath. 

“You fell in love with someone else,” she whispered to his ghost or to the trees or just to herself. “And I can’t even be pissed at you for it because you’re _dead_.”

At least she was pretty sure that he did. Nothing was certain exactly. Nothing would ever be certain. She wasn’t even certain what she felt about this new situation – her alive and Finn dead and the ground beneath her feet and Wells on bedrest and a prisoner bearing wounds she helped inflict and the Blake siblings always underfoot and they needed food and it was getting colder. 

Apparently the death of the one person in the world that you loved most can just become an item on a long list of shit to deal with. A list that was getting longer with every passing moment. 

“Here you are,” Bellamy’s voice came low and steady from close behind her. He could have been there the entire time, he didn’t sound surprised to see her there. 

He didn’t say, _You shouldn’t be out here alone,_ he’d learned better by then. 

“Here I am,” she spun around on her heel and held her arms out at her sides. 

He leaned forward slightly, not moving forward but giving the impression that he wanted to shorten the space between them, “He said you were asleep.”

“The Chancellor doesn’t dictate what I do.” She didn’t mean to be hostile, she never meant to be argumentative and bitter, no one ever means to be the petty version of themselves, she just stopped fighting it. Bellamy smirked at her and she sighed, “He kicked me out and I told him I’d rest. Let’s just… keep that between us, okay?” He ducked his head in response, a half-nod that never came back up and looked more like a bow. “What’s the new catastrophe?”

Bellamy Blake only came looking for her when there was another problem that needed solved, a riddle that needed answered. In the past couple of weeks, Clarke had grown more and more withdrawn and Wells was in no position to leave his tent yet – though she suspected he was enjoying having Monty play nursemaid more than he should – which left her as the person expected to corral Bellamy into something resembling a logical-thinking human being. Miller took orders like a good lieutenant, and Raven picked fights because in her short time since arriving she’d gleaned that was what Wells and Clarke had done whenever Bellamy got a bright idea. She’d much rather be in her tent tinkering around with the few parts she could get her hands on, making radios for the war Bellamy could sense on the horizon and Wells was determined could be avoided. 

He shook his head, “I wasn’t looking for you.”

“Oh.” 

They both looked down at the grave at the same moment and the thing she didn’t want to give voice to spilled out before she could stop it, “Finn and Clarke… they were, weren’t they?”

“You’re mistaking me for someone who cares,” he said it like he meant it, like he didn’t care, like it wasn’t the most ridiculous lie she’d ever heard him tell in the past month. 

The bravado of it nearly made her laugh. 

“I wasn’t here—“

“Time to move on,” he said it like he’d never known a broken heart in his life. Maybe he hadn’t. 

She thought about Finn, her Finn, her spacewalker. Reckless and funny and charming and so terribly self-centered and hard-headed and kind. Move on from that? When he was in the ground a few inches from where she stood?

Floating was so much easier, no body lingering around and calling attention to the pain of loss, no body marking the place where a person should be. 

She looked up, “So I think I know how to get the walkie-talkies to work.”

He grinned at her, relieved or something like it, “You may be a huge pain in the ass, but you’re smart.”

Their arms brushed against each other’s as they walked back to camp. She never asked him what he was doing out near the camp’s makeshift cemetery in the middle of the afternoon. 

He’d never mistake her for someone who cared. 

 

They fought more or less on the ground than they had on the Ark. Maybe they had never really fought on the Ark – she was pulling away from him because for the first time she had somewhere to go outside of his gaze. There was a whole world for her to run into. There were so many more ways and reasons to run away from him. 

Maybe she had just been waiting for the space to run and he’d be left staring down at his empty hands no matter how hard he clung onto her. 

“She’s out there again, isn’t she?” Wells limped up to where he was waiting at the gate. Sunset was coming soon and Octavia wasn’t back. She slipped in through the back somewhere, knew a weakness to the wall that he should probably fix but didn’t want to give her more reasons to lie. 

He nodded, eyes scanning the dense forest that seemed every day to get closer and closer even if that was the furthest thing from truth. 

_His sister.  
His responsibility._

Wells stood by him, waiting. A hunting group came back, cheerful and successful, Clarke bringing up the rear. She smiled at Wells and nodded at Bellamy before heading straight back to the dropship. 

The sun started to sink, the shadows deepened, and Wells got antsy next to him. 

Bellamy tried to think of something to talk about, but it wasn’t really his style to fill empty air with empty chatter. At some point Miller came up and the three of them discussed guard shifts and hunting parties and supplies as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky and Wells’ eyes flicked out towards the trees more often than in to the growing crowd around the campfire. 

When Raven finally came tromping through the trees, Bellamy put a hand on Wells shoulder to stop the lecture that he knew would only result in her laughing at him. 

“Fuck Raven, cutting it kinda close, aren’t you?” Octavia’s voice came from behind them. He turned to his sister and raised his eyebrows at the large cut of meat in her hand. She blew her hair out away from her face and laughed at him, “Don’t even ask, Bell. I’m not sharing. Get your own dinner.” And then her arm was slung around Raven’s waist and they were headed together to the fire. 

Wells chuckled beside him. Together, they closed the gate. 

 

“I can’t believe you did this,” Raven hissed at him with all that fire he found himself taking for granted these days. 

Wells smiled at her, feeling cocky and proud and triumphant. If Raven was pissed at him, then he probably had done something right. “It’s the right thing to do. And you’re coming with me.”

Raven stared at him, turned to Bellamy, who shrugged, and glanced at Clarke, who shook her head and backed up a step. 

“Okay,” she turned and faced the group. “We’re gonna need a contingency plan.”

She never asked to be a fucking hero. 

Turned out leadership felt even heavier on her shoulders. 

 

He could feel his blood pumping in his ears and there was a distant screaming that he wouldn’t bet a half-day’s rations was real. “Remind me what happens if this doesn’t work,” he hissed, eyes focused on the bridge overhead, his sister’s hand on a grounder’s shoulder, Wells and Raven calmly waiting. 

“Raven says _BOOM_ ,” Miller whispered back, hidden in the branches of a tree a few yards over. 

“Remind me what happens if this _does_ work,” he muttered low enough so that no one could hear. Somewhere behind him, Clarke swore softly and he fought the urge to shush her. 

Peace talks. 

He looked up at Wells, shoulders squared, Raven close behind, spine straight and sure. 

This better fucking work. 

 

She went straight to the place that she always went to when she was happy or sad or worried or stressed, to talk to _him_ , to look down at where the last parts of him still lingered. She ran all the way from the bridge, her feet thrumming across the ground. 

His face was starting to blur in her memories. Sometimes she saw him in the way Miller walked, in the way Octavia blew her hair out of her face, in the way Monty laughed like he was surprised at himself. He was everywhere and nowhere. 

She went straight to him and she wasn’t the only one. 

It’s hard to be angry at a boy who is lying in the ground.   
It’s hard to hold a grudge against a girl who couldn’t have known there was someone else’s heart already invested in the boy that stole hers away. 

There was no time to mourn and there was no space left over to be angry. 

In (a boy in the heart isn’t everything).  
On (skin bears scars better anyway).  
Under (bury the pain).

As she walked up, jubilant, her steps light, she heard Clarke’s husky voice clear in the dark night. 

_I didn’t know. I could have loved you. Why didn’t you tell me?_

She sounded tired, like she’d asked this question too many times before for the answer to matter much. Like she’d been there before. 

Raven suddenly wondered how they had never run into each other here before. Her mind scanned back on the past few weeks and she couldn’t remember the last time she had come here. To him. This was the place that she went. And maybe there had been too much going on, maybe she had kept busy just enough that making time to talk to a ghost didn’t make sense the way it had once, or maybe his face was starting to blur in her memory. 

In (a finger held in a fist).  
On (a palm against a fist).  
Under (knuckles hitting a fist).

Everything was always skin and bone and blood and muscle. Everything had an end. 

 

He left the celebration early, ducked into his tent, waiting until he was alone to let the smile bloom across his face and his shoulders slump down in relief. There was nothing about war that he liked, he’d read too many stories about war to Octavia when they were kids, heard too many stories about war from his mother before that. He had thought war inevitable, knew too clearly how to smell it in the air. He had never been so glad to be wrong, to find a way out. 

“What are you doing in here?”

It should have felt more like a surprise than it was. 

Raven stood up and took off her shirt in one motion, fluid, like she had nothing to hide, like all these weeks he’d been chipping away at her and she’d stopped hiding, her spine as straight as it had been on that bridge just a few short hours before. 

He put his hands on his hip and couldn’t help his eyes from becoming suddenly fixated on her naval. “If you’re looking for someone to talk you down, tell you that you’re just upset and not thinking straight, I’m not that guy.”

She considered him for a moment and he felt more naked than she was, standing there in only her cotton underwear in the middle of his tent, and then her face softened just slightly, “Good.”

 

In (his fingers twining through her hair).  
On (his lips pressed against hers).  
Under (her hands pressing his chest down).

So this was what moving on felt like.


	2. let them eat cake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> five years after the events of chapter one, Anya comes to Bellamy and Raven for a favor they'd like to refuse, but can't
> 
>    
>  _And every night since leaving Camp Jaha, he climbed into bed next to Raven Reyes._  
>  _The first night they had fallen down all together: him, Raven, Wells, Lincoln, Octavia, Clarke, Miller, and Monty. It was too cold to sleep alone and they were too tired to draw lines, figure out separate tents, it didn’t feel practical. They came to a place, called out for a rest, and then it was them altogether on the ground, under a makeshift lean-to, smashed together for warmth and for comfort. The others moved out from underneath them, leaving the two of them alone with each other and neither one willing to brave the cold alone._  
>  _Maybe they were just what was left over after everything else fell into place or maybe they were what held it all together. He tried not to over-analyze it._

__

** five years later… **

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Anya smiled tightly at the formal words she always felt she had to offer when she visited. “Your cooking is getting better,” she teased slightly.

Bellamy chuckled and nodded, “We’re always happy to have you.”

“Next time, call first,” Raven grumbled a little, shooting Anya a half-smile as she eased herself into the chair Miller had made for her back in the first days of what they had called a camp but now was nearly more than a village. 

Anya took Raven’s cantankerous mood with good humor, smiling brightly suddenly over at Bellamy. “You know…”

“If you tell him to shack up with one of your warriors again I swear you won’t leave this house alive,” Raven warned. 

They both laughed at her and she scowled at them, rubbing at her bad leg absently. It was coming on autumn and this winter was going to be a hard one. Bellamy sat down next to her and lifted her legs onto his lap, rubbing them gently. “Maybe you should at least put on a good show when we have visitors,” he turned to Anya and winked, “ _sometimes_ she’s much nicer than this.”

Anya winked back and then sobered. “I’m sorry for coming unannounced, but there’s something I needed to discuss with you,” she nodded at Raven, who leaned forward. 

Peace between the grounders and the sky people – which is what they were called now – hadn’t been as easy as their first talks had made it seem it could be. The drop of the rest of the Ark had caused a split between most of the hundred and the newcomers, and the peace that had been promised by one group wasn’t upheld by the other, not to mention the seemingly constant in-fighting. 

Bellamy counted time in years on the ground and as the only person that seemed remotely interested in keeping records, the terms had caught on. Sometime in the summer of Year 2 Counsellor Jaha was captured by Mount Weather and that act sparked the war that Wells had been doing all he could to stop and Bellamy had smelled on the air the moment they stepped on the ground. Now only a year and a half after the cease-fire, the grounders and sky people no longer felt as though they had a common enemy so it didn’t really surprise him that Anya was here now. He’d honestly expected it much sooner than this. 

“Should I get Wells?” Bellamy asked softly, glancing between their serious faces. After the cease-fire he’d stepped back from politics and let Raven take the lead with Wells at her side. Clarke had long ago disappeared into the grounder warrior ranks, consort to a leader, she seemed happy when she stopped in for visits every few months. 

Anya shook her head, “This is a question for you, too.”

Bellamy leaned back, hands restlessly rubbing Raven’s calves. 

“I need you to host a party.”

Raven raised one eyebrow slowly, “A party?”

Anya nodded. 

Bellamy exchanged a wry glance with Raven before turning back to Anya, “You want the village to host a party?” This sounded like something that needed Wells’ opinion. 

“No. I need you two to host a party.”

Raven barked out a laugh, “What kind of a party?”

“I don’t think our house is big enough,” Bellamy gestured with one hand at the one-room shack they called a home. There were other structures in the village that were much bigger, but they didn’t need much space for just the two of them and there always seemed like something else more pressing needed to be done. Something else in the village that needed repaired or rebuilt or mended or a well to be dug or a garden to be tended to. They didn’t spend much time under their private roof and it showed. 

Anya’s eyes flicked around the room and shook her head, “It’s not that kind of party.”

“What kind of party _is it_?” Raven pressed impatiently. 

“A wedding.”

They stared at her. 

“Wait. Why do you want _us_ to host it?” Bellamy asked in the same moment Raven said, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

They looked at each other, a current of energy running between them, and in half a moment, nothing was said but everything was understood. 

Bellamy gently lifted Raven’s legs off his lap and stood up, “I’m going to get Wells,” he pointed at Anya, “ _and_ Lincoln.” 

She’d have everything figured out by the time he got back with reinforcements. 

 

Their home had begun as a tent made up of scavenged tarps and skins traded for from the Grounders. Something even smaller than the tent Raven had commandeered during their days with the hundred, but big enough for the two of them. In the early days, they were always running into each other, tripping over each other. It had felt like a joke most of the time, the way they couldn’t do anything without touching each other. 

He thought maybe that was how they had learned to survive, always within arm’s reach of the other and the rest of the world just outside the bubble that only had enough room for the two of them. 

Miller started by making chairs and then Raven’s worktable and then he built Wells a house. Or something like a house. Bellamy, Lincoln, and Monroe help him keep it a secret until it is done, watching curiously and getting underfoot with every stutter and start. In the end, it’s the first of many little shacks they construct as a community, Miller directing them and giving guidance when he can, learning by trial and error when he can’t. 

Their little ‘house’ is the last one built. 

It’s not that they were forgotten or put off until last, it was just that there were so many that they put first. Maybe that was a sign of them being selfless or something, but Raven just laughed and reminded everyone that she had demanded she have a workshop first. 

“I have my priorities,” she’d said cheekily when Miller finally came by their tent and told them if they didn’t start building that week, they’d be in a tent through _another_ winter. 

And so had Bellamy. She spent more time in her workshop than their tent and it wasn’t like he was sitting around twiddling his thumbs waiting for her to be done for the day. 

Despite their protests, Miller planned a structure that was a good three feet wider than they requested, which still made it one of the smallest in the camp. They did have the steepest roof, with one side extending a couple of feet over the edge of the outside wall so that Bellamy could sit against the doorframe when it rained and stay dry. 

“We all have our priorities,” he’s said seriously when Miller had raised his eyebrows at his request. 

He liked watching the lightning storms, seeing the sky and clouds flash with color and light. And after a few nights of grumbling, Raven learned to look forward to the storms, especially once she could do so without getting wet, wrapped up in a blanket and Bellamy’s arms, a cut of hot tea in her hands, the sky putting on a display that felt like it was just for them. 

 

“We have terrible friends,” Bellamy said the minute he shut the door on Lincoln’s laughing back. “We need new friends.”

“Technically they are like… your brother-in-law and the mayor or whatever,” Raven corrected from the bed. 

He shrugged out of his shirt and pants, laying them carefully on Raven’s chair before crawling beneath the blanket and pressing himself against her, “I’ll trade them in for new ones.”

“I really like Echo,” Raven murmured. “Maybe O would be willing to switch teams for the sake of the family and my sanity.”

Bellamy rubbed his eyes with one hand and Raven took the opportunity to slide down, rest her head on his chest. “We have to host a grounder wedding.”

“Yup.”

“Us. You and me.”

“Yup.”

He let a beat pass, wrapped his arm around her shoulders and grinned. “Think maybe that means _we_ oughta get married?”

She kicked him out of bed so quickly he didn’t have time to catch himself, ended up sprawled on ground on his back, laughing. 

 

Leaving was the easy part. Camp Jaha was still just an idea when Bellamy caught Raven’s eye over the heads of a crowd and she inclined her head towards Wells, who nodded. It was as simple as walking away, Raven’s hand heavy on his forearm and a line of Delinquents behind them. It wasn’t supposed to be a movement or a statement, it was just one decision. 

She always maintained that leaving was the hardest part, everything else after that came easy, but maybe that was because they had already done the beginning before. Every society should have one beginning, he’d always thought, but it turned out that everything starts in fits, with lulls and moments of emptiness and a million endings. 

Just like they began, maybe. A glance in a crowd, a naked night, a hand held in a moment of pain. Over and over. Until it wasn’t a beginning anymore or a pattern, it just was how they lived, how they got through each day. 

And then there was war and beginnings and existential political questions got put to the side in favor of survival. There’d be time when the smoke cleared they thought. 

 

 

In the beginning it was simple. Wells was the face the Ark wanted to see, his negotiations kept war at bay, kept Kane from retaliating against the sting of losing his workforce and army. It wasn’t just the hundred that followed that day – or in the weeks that followed – and Wells somehow managing to finagle Bellamy into impassioned speeches right when he knew the right people were listening did more than Bellamy would later have liked to think about. The Grounders respected Raven – the way she treated her injury, her devil-may-care attitude towards honesty, her relationship with Lincoln and Octavia. She taught them about explosions and picked up Trigedasleng faster than anyone else. That left Bellamy to take care of everything in-between. The hundred – those left alive – still thought of him as their leader and when the time came they respected him as a General. 

Clarke came and went in the early days – more torn by what her mother and her old life could have promised than she probably thought. Wells always had some kind of job for her to do. When the Grounders realized that Lincoln had begun laying down permanent roots with Octavia, someone discussed the need for an exchange and Clarke volunteered to be trained by Anya as one of her warriors. After that, the give and take between their village and the Grounders was much less political. Eventually Clarke was noticed by Lexa – the leader of the Kongeda – and that new path took her far away from her mother and the expectations of their old world. _Princess_ had a whole new meaning these days. She was happy and strong and Wells stopped taking her leaving personally long before she did. 

There was something to be said for moving on. 

 

During the war, lines got fuzzy and it stopped being so clear why they had been there in the first place – and their little camp grew. 

When the dust settled, their little kingdom was equal parts Grounder, Delinquent, and Arker. No longer just a haven for teens frustrated with lost independence, Bellamy came home to a thriving, multi-generational village, Raven and Wells smiling sheepishly at him from the center of it. 

He knew enough about war to be just as afraid of what comes after – the anger and fear always had to have somewhere to go. 

 

Tensions between the clans were once again on the rise. 

It had happened before and it wouldn’t be the last time. Lexa – or possibly Anya and Clarke whispering in her ear – felt that celebrating a union between two rival clans might help soothe some old wounds. 

“Like here,” Anya said. 

“ _Here_ we don’t throw parties and invite warring clans to the ceremony,” Bellamy countered. “Here it just _happens_.”

“Usually without a party at all,” Raven added. 

They’ll come for a party and being here would help solidify the alliance from one in name only to something a bit more practical. Or, that was the theory Lexa and her advisors seemed to be working under. 

Except old wounds were just as prevalent here as anywhere else. Scuffles and slurs and bad blood didn’t just go away because you willed them to, regardless of how harmonious it all seemed to an outsider. For the most part the day-to-day stress of survival took precedence over old prejudices, but occasionally something spilled over. You couldn’t fix a hundred years of bad habits in just a couple of years. 

“But it _can_ be done,” Anya glared over at him. 

“It’s been maybe two years,” Raven mused aloud, “we’re still working at it.”

“But we’re working,” Wells was acting like someone had packaged up this entire thing just for him, just for him to prove something to his father ten miles upriver. 

“We’ll do it,” Lincoln said decidedly, nodding his head at Anya as if it was only those two in the room. “There’s nowhere else.”

And that was the kick in the ass, wasn’t it? In trying to the fuck away from the political baggage of the clans and the Ark – in trying to be a new place – they’d not only brought everything with them, they were the site for peace treaties and inter-clan conflict. 

“Why us,” Bellamy finally broke in, since talking them out of this ridiculous plan wasn’t working. “Why not Octavia and Lincoln?”

“Two healers!” Anya scoffed. “A teacher and a pacifist that stayed on the fringe during the Weather War?” Bellamy thought of the way the Grounders shrank back from Octavia when she entered a space she occupied, shooting her nervous looks, the way they deferred to Lincoln in a way similar to their manner towards their own leaders. It was less their pacifism and more their relationship with the Wastelanders and the cast out children. Anya shook her head, “You, a general and a strategist, _leaders_. It’s you.”

Bellamy exchanged a glance with Raven, they were the least offensive was what Anya was really saying. Respected _just enough_ and not politically involved in anything that could be seen as transgressive. He was pretty sure Octavia and Echo had just returned from the Ice Nation with an infant, a sickly one judging from the dark circles under Lincoln’s eyes that day. And Wells had a way of rubbing the Grounder warriors the wrong way with his grandstanding and general enthusiasm. Which left them. They weren’t the perfect option, but they were the least dangerous. 

“It’s us,” Raven beamed gaily. “The public face of good grounder domesticity.”

Anya smiled at Raven’s sarcasm, but decided to take the statement at face-value. 

“Now’s probably a bad time to point out that your cooking is actually getting worse and that you begged Lincoln to make dinner tonight, huh?” Wells smirked. 

Anya left chuckling and Bellamy fought the urge to throw Wells out on his ass. He didn’t fancy Monty mooning at him all the next day or Miller glaring at him for the next month. 

Probably shouldn’t have said that out loud, either, since it seemed to please Wells a little too much. 

 

Bellamy looked around Octavia’s cave and didn’t know whether to throw her into the river and hope she sank or laugh. The entire place was covered in children. Some as young as four and others that looked like they could have been in the Skybox, rag-taggle teens with eyes that glowed in the dark shadows of the cave. 

“O what the hell?” he wanted to put his hands on his waist and play the part of General but he was tired and was only back home for a few nights with a message for Wells and Raven from Lexa. Generally a lower scout would have been sent with a message like this, it wasn’t sensitive or war-changing, just general inquiries about supplies and new recruits, but they’d sought him out, Clarke finding him and shoving him off before he could protest. And it was damn nice to be home, to fetch water for Raven, to massage her back in the evenings, to see Lincoln’s thriving garden, and apparently to find Octavia’s hidden little orphanage. 

“They just kick them out, Bell!” her eyes wide and full of that fire that grew and grew under floorboards right under his nose. “They’re just kids and they _throw them away_!” 

Her chin quivered and he swept her into a hug without asking any more questions. Of course she’d be the one to find the children of the ground that were like her. 

War made orphans its calling card and after generations of population-control, there were plenty of Arkers that were willing to take in displaced children, learning by trial-through-fire how to be _families_ and siblings again. Most of the older ones refused to leave, so Monty and Lincoln put them to work in the gardens and Miller commandeered the strongest for the building crew. And so the camp grew, Octavia dragging in Wastelanders and others appearing on their own. 

She developed a reputation among the Grounders, they’d never admit it but most of them were terrified of Octavia in an abstract way they couldn’t quite define. She had the loyalty and respect of the Wastelanders, the unofficial chieftain of a group of people that should never have been a group and had never before had a common interest. Octavia managed to rehabilitate children that grew up on their own, wild and hostile even by Grounder standards, turned them into … well, something slightly less than gentle. 

 

“What does your father think about you leaving?” he probably asked too late for it to appear as though he cared. 

“It’s not like I shot him,” Wells replied absently, shooting him a grin once his words sunk in. 

“Don’t be a dick,” Bellamy shoved him lightly. 

“Nah, it’s like he gets it. Philosophically, he’s basically on our side.”

“Then…”

“Practically he thinks we’re idiots who are doomed to fail within a year. But you know… _philosophically_ he’s totally rooting for us.”

Bellamy shook his head, “What a jackass.”

“Wanna talk about your dad?”

“We aren’t friends,” Bellamy smiled.

Wells threw back his head and laughed, startling the troop of people following them, “Nope. Definitely not.”

 

And every night since leaving Camp Jaha, he climbed into bed next to Raven Reyes. 

The first night they had fallen down all together: him, Raven, Wells, Lincoln, Octavia, Clarke, Miller, and Monty. It was too cold to sleep alone and they were too tired to draw lines, figure out separate tents, it didn’t feel practical. They came to a place, called out for a rest, and then it was them altogether on the ground, under a makeshift lean-to, smashed together for warmth and for comfort. The others moved out from underneath them, Clarke constructing a truly terrifying shelter high in the branches of a tree, Lincoln finding a cave near the river for Octavia, Miller luring Wells and Monty off to the camp’s first self-standing wooden building that was little more than a tiny shack but perfect for the three of them, leaving the two of them alone with each other and neither one willing to brave the cold alone. 

Maybe they were just what was left over after everything else fell into place or maybe they were what held it all together. He tried not to over-analyze it. 

“Do you miss me while you’re gone?” she’d asked, eyes full of mischief, something lurking behind them that still expected him to say _no_ , to not come back, to reveal that he’d never wanted her anyway. 

There was no way to explain war and he didn’t try, just kissed her and prayed to every diety he didn’t believe in that he’d stay alive long enough to come back and prove – somehow – that the hardest thing he’d ever do is walk away from her. 

 

“How do you even host a wedding?” Bellamy groused a few days later, head in his hands. “Do I have to perform the ceremony?”

“No!” Raven burst out, then looked around the fire a little wildly. “No, right? The answer is no?”

“God I want it to be yes,” Wells chuckled. 

Monty squinted at them, “I keep thinking you three will grow the fuck up—“

Miller and Echo shushed him quickly. 

 

“God can you imagine?” Octavia whispered as Clarke passed in the crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder with Lexa, a giant spear in her hand and markings on her face. “I could be scary warrior girl like Clarke right now if Indra had gotten what she wanted.”

Lincoln and Octavia never really explained why they had chosen not to disappear into the Woods Clan during the upheaval after the Ark crash-landed on the ground, but little hints and jokes they made over the years suggested that it was something a lot of people had been paying close attention to. 

Raven leaned into her side and laughed, “Not possible. You’re a jellyfish!”

 

He had nightmares – years later – of Murphy and that fucking gun. Went to war and back, saw death in all the ways he’d read about and never wanted to experience, but this was the moment that haunted him. He should have hid the guns when he’d found them. He’d wake up and it was like she always knew somehow, but she’d still be Raven, tough as nails and a goddamn pain in the ass – but her leg was just as much a part of that as anything else about her. 

When Abby lay Raven down on that table, he’d stayed in the room, gripping her hand as she screamed, until he eventually got kicked out. Abby saying something about how his questions were stressing her out, Clarke’s hand in the small of his back pushing him out and away. Wells sat outside with him, his knees jumping up and down as Bellamy paced back and forth across the yard. 

“You know, I read about this thing in the old days, before the Ark,” Wells started, watching Bellamy walk past him. “When a woman would go into labor, the father would have to wait in the hall and they’d pace just like you’re doing now.”

“I _wish_ that screaming was about a kid and not about…” Bellamy slowed for a moment. 

“I doubt Raven would feel the same,” Wells said darkly. 

Wells sat and Bellamy paced and Raven’s life stayed on the line, her screams echoing in their ears long after she passed out from the pain. 

When it was decided that he would leave, be the General that Anya and Indra kept telling him they needed him to be, Raven crashed around camp for the full week beforehand. She didn’t want war, not in any practical way, but being left behind pissed her off. She was the smartest of all of them, she kept them all going whether she knew it or not, and they needed her brain. But Abby was insistent that she shouldn’t travel long distances, her back and legs couldn’t handle the strain. She knew it, they all knew it. It still pissed her off. 

He always imagined her the way he first saw her, sprinting across the woods hot on his tail, running faster than she should have been able to, kicking his legs out from underneath him and pinning him to the ground with her body, a knife to his throat. 

He didn’t want that person anywhere near what the war against Mt. Weather turned out to be, didn’t want that face to see the things he had to do in order to get home to her. 

He was grateful every day that there was something holding her back, keeping her safe at home, and tried very hard to feel guilty for that. 

 

“I’m not even a ‘leader’ anymore,” Bellamy protested, three days after Anya dropped the bomb on their lap, pacing back and forth in front of the door of Raven’s workshop. She had taken one look at his facial expression and shouted at him to stay the hell outside, which left him shouting through the open door at her back bent over her bench, one of her apprentices in the corner shooting him sheepish looks. 

“Hmhmm,” she murmured, tossing the kid a rusty looking part and swiveling around to look at him, crossing her arms over her chest. 

“We have to tell her no,” he stopped and put his hands on either side of the entrance, breathing heavily. 

“You already said yes,” she wasn’t amused. 

Well, good. Neither was he. 

“Well we change our mind.”

“Mel and Reese were in here earlier,” she stood up, her tone suggesting that she was changing the subject. 

Bellamy smiled, the two girls had grown closer after the war and had come to live in the village the previous summer on Abby’s recommendation. Reese had been seen following Miller around, begging him for an apprenticeship, and Bellamy had swept Mel under his wing by the second week. Mel had a bit of a bitter streak and sitting her down with some of his easier repairs calmed her down exactly like he knew it would. “Wells drag them in here for causing mischief again?”

“Not exactly,” she smirked. 

_Fuck_.

“They’re excited about the wedding.”

“They’re excited about the wedding.”

He stared her down for a minute and then dropped his hands. She won. She always won. “This is the part where you tell me that the village wants a big party and I need to suck it up, isn’t it?”

“I would never say something like that,” she swung back around to her worktable, using her hands to lift her leg up on a bar Miller had made for her that purpose, “I was just passing on the message. Mel went to Camp Jaha to trade for some nicer fabric for you.”

Bellamy growled slightly, the kid in the corner turning it’s wide eyes on him in alarm. 

“Stop scaring my apprentice, Blake.”

He came by later with a basketful of wild berries Monty promised the kid – Sachel – liked. Raven gave the both of them a stern lecture about _playing favorites_ and dropped the phrase _no favorites around here_ about five times, but there was a smile playing on the corner of her lips. 

 

Stepping down didn’t necessarily mean people stopped coming to him. He was the local idiot or a collective bad habit no one was willing to break. 

Miller set up a table for him to work at under the wide eves of the little shack he and Raven called a home on good days, a house on bad, and _that shit of a shack_ when the roof leaked on a bad day. 

Raven had a much more official sort of building and an apprentice or two, but after the war he had a table where he took in mending and fashioned clothes from old scraps and watched the village. 

Their ‘home’ wasn’t exactly in the center of the village – it had once been on the outskirts, but overtime things had cropped up around them. Just in front was a clearing for a shared bonfire and a well – the smallest of the two that served the village. Despite being on the edge, once he sat down at that table, the whole village seemed to crop up in front of him. 

If there was a town center it wasn’t the hall Miller and Raven built or Well’s house where he did most of conferencing, or Lincoln’s garden, or Octavia’s school, or the little Market Monroe and Fox were unofficially in-charge of, it was Bellamy’s rickety work table. 

There wasn’t a day that Raven arrived home and didn’t find a group of kids crouched under his table listening to one of his stories or a crying girl in his chair or a pair of bickering teens beseeching him with their eyes or a group of people building a fire as he worked silently and ignored their need to be near him. 

Leader or no, it was Bellamy that solved the small, petty problems in their little community; stopped arguments and gave council. To him, it just seemed like he couldn’t get through a day without someone bothering him with a conversation he’d rather not have, but Raven knew that he was the center, the thing that kept them going. 

 

Preparations for the wedding and the party went on under his nose and he tried to stay out of it as much as possible. He and Raven were the _official_ hosts, but to him that meant that on the day, he’d show up and smile and do all the scraping that was necessary and in the meantime, he was leaving the preparations in the hands of Raven and Wells, who were better at this sort of thing. 

“No,” Raven looked down at him and shook her head sternly. “You have actually lost your mind if you think that’s happening tonight.”

Bellamy pressed a kiss onto her hipbone and then looked up the length of her, eyes twinkling, “Why not?” His voice was pitched low and it had been a long day and he’d been thinking about this moment since he brought lunch by Raven’s shop and she’d winked at him through the open door. 

“Because I’m mad at you,” she sniffed and turned her head away, dismissing him. 

Bellamy wracked his brain for what he might have done. It could have been anything, except that he took her lunch. Okay, so Reese had made it, but he still _delivered_ it and surely that counted for _something_? It wasn’t her birthday, there wasn’t anything else he could remember that he might have forgotten. He dropped his forehead onto her stomach and sighed, “What did I do this time?”

“Well if you don’t know…”

“Nope!” He lifted up and kneeled at her feet, shaking his head. “You are not that person, and I am not that person, you are _not_ doing the thing.”

Raven raised an eyebrow. 

And thus began the staring contest to end all staring contests between them. He told stories about it much later, when he was sure that she wouldn’t be pissed that he told people how scary she can be in bed. Not a fact she really liked him bandying around. 

“Alright,” he sat back on his heels and shrugged. “I lose. I’m the worst. I have _no idea_ what you are talking about or why you are mad. But I’m sorry?”

She still didn’t say anything. 

He cocked his head to the side, “Is this about letting Reese make you lunch today because I’m pretty sure you hate my cooking…”

“You suck at cooking.”

“… because I suck at cooking and Reese isn’t terrible at it and … okay. Are you mad because I asked Sachin to make sure you stop carrying Miller’s requests over to him because the kid _is_ your apprentice and that’s kind of his _job_ and your back has been bothering you a lot the past week and I really think we should ask Abby—“

“I don’t want to host this wedding,” she interrupted finally. 

“I … was not expecting that.”

“Why would I want to host a Grounder wedding? Why would I want to host any wedding?”

This was definitely what Miller called a _trick question_. Apparently Wells was notorious for them. 

He sighed, “Why _would_ you want to host a wedding.”

“I don’t,” she lifted herself up on her elbows. 

“We can say no.”

“We can’t.” He reached his arms out to support himself as he moved to lay down on his stomach next to her, supporting himself on his elbows. “Why can’t we?”

“Because it’s a good idea,” Raven sank back against the makeshift pillow Clarke had brought for her a few years back. “And you know it.”

The wedding had created a buzz throughout the village, everyone was excited and Wells was swimming in volunteers wanting to contribute in any way that they could. It was good for them, to have something _good_ to look forward to, instead of just another harsh winter or a possible skirmish on their borders or an illness. After the war, the militia had come back and there’d been no time to celebrate, winter had been right around the corner and there were suddenly twice as many mouths to feed and heads that needed a place to lay down. And since then it had been one thing after another. Weddings and births went by unmarked, deaths came and came and there was just the grind regardless. 

It was a good idea. And their little kingdom needed a party just as much as the Grounders needed a symbol of peace. 

“I’ll help more,” Bellamy said softly, kissing her bare shoulder softly. 

“You’ll help more,” she looked so relieved he felt a sudden weight of guilt settle in his gut. He hadn’t realized how much she had been feeling overwhelmed until that moment. 

“I’m an ass.”

She giggled and pulled him in for another kiss, “But a very hot one, so I’ll let this one slide.” 

 

Wells liked to tell stories around the fire and her favorite was about a girl in red shoes lost on a yellow road. 

One night she told Bellamy, “You are the metal man.” 

He’d laughed and kissed her. 

When he could, he responded with laughter and kisses. She tried to be furious with him, but she’d seen the other boys that came back from the war, boys haunted and scared, who woke up shaking in the night, who fucked and couldn’t love, who pushed everyone away. She’d seen the children who had been turned into warriors come back, dragging their feet through the mud, their eyes never seeing the world in front of them, unable to laugh the way they used to. Okay, so he didn’t take her seriously sometimes, and every time he kissed her there was a laugh on his lips, but that wasn’t anything to complain about, not really. 

What she’d meant was: _you think you have no heart, but you are **our** heart._

“And Wells is the straw man,” she’d said days later. 

Our brain, our conscience, our philosophy to fall back on. 

“And you are the lion,” he’d said gently. 

Our strength, our fire, our fight. 

_My Courage._

Monty said he wanted to be the lost girl with the red shoes and Octavia had kissed his cheek for saying so and Miller had challenged her to a duel in retaliation and Lincoln and Wells had had to drag them all away to sleep off Harper’s moonshine before they burned the whole village down and they never spoke of it again. 

But Bellamy remembered. 

That winter they went to visit Indra for the Winter Festival and there he gave her a tiny metal bracelet with _COURAGE_ engraved on it. 

“Because I need it?” she’d asked with her eyebrows nearly disappearing into her hairline. 

“To remind you that you’re carrying mine,” he’d said, blushing when she laughed at him for being so cheesy, holding onto her chin to kiss her through her laughter. 

He’d always been a coward, but holding her hand made him feel like something more. 

 

“How can I help?”

Wells was crouched over, inspecting the new crops in Monty’s private garden. “I think Monty would put a bounty out on your head if you brought those boots into his garden,” he responded darkly, a smile splitting his face. 

Bellamy shuffled his feet, “I mean with the wedding.”

Wells stood up, “Raven chewed you out didn’t she?” At Bellamy’s facial expression, Wells burst into laughter, “Guess I owe Nate … um…” he shook his head. “Never mind what I owe him, let’s just say I lost a bet.”

Wells was the only person that called Miller by his first name. Bellamy was pretty sure he heard Monty call him _Miller_. “I don’t want to know the stakes… and don’t let Raven hear—“

He clapped Bellamy on the back with his hand, “Alright, let me take you over to Nate and he can give you a list. Poor thing is so overwhelmed and won’t let me help…”

Bellamy nodded along as Wells talked, only half-listening and hoping that Miller’s list didn’t involve him having to go to Camp Jaha. He hated going up there. 

Later that day, Wells poked his head through Raven’s door and hissed, “So you withheld sex to get Bell involved in the wedding? Isn’t that a little…?”

Raven threw a screw at him and Sachel blinked at him, wide-eyed. “We aren’t friends, stop telling people that I like you.”

“Be nicer to your boy there, sis,” he called as he ducked back out, avoiding another screw that flew at his head. 

“I hate you!” she called back, and then turned back to deal with Sachel.


	3. i'd bet my heart ('cause around you i'd rather lose)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the romcom segment - a flashback to about 6mos after the kids set up their own camp, this is the 'getting-together' part
> 
> _“Raven, I’m so---“_
> 
> _“Stop,” she cut him off, suddenly worried that if she heard his lame apology that she’d forgive him. And she wasn’t ready to forgive him. Not for disappearing for weeks without a word. Not for shouting at her. Not for belittling her. Not for making her feel like maybe she belonged to someone again._
> 
> _She looked him up and down and hoped desperately that her voice wouldn’t give her away, “You’re mistaking me for someone who cares.”_

Cohabitation and something more was a strangely simple transition for both of them, one minute they were two people who shared a tent together and maybe (once) (a long time ago) had had sex and the next they were something more. 

It didn’t begin in the nervous, hesitant way that she always thought someone after Finn would begin, a nervous kiss, hands reaching for each other in the dark and then pulling away, awkward silences they both longed to fill but just couldn’t. 

Instead it was dinners together instead of apart, casual touches that warmed and didn’t hurt, knowing without speaking, silences that were heavy with understanding. Sometimes it was knowing where the other was any hour of the day, noticing a new callous on his hand without touching him, sensing an injury just by the way he moved, knowing his mood from across camp just by the way he held his shoulders. Sometimes it was arguments that lasted for days and ended with a joke or a small gift, a warm arm around her shoulders on a cold night, elbows bumping as they worked. 

“I think I’m dating Bellamy Blake,” she said one day, trying to force a casual tone to her voice and failing. 

Wells didn’t even look up, “I sure as fuck hope so.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean,” he sighed impatiently, “that if you _weren’t_ we were going to have to have a serious talk.”

Raven glanced over at him and then back to the frayed wires she was trying to wrangle back into usefulness, “ _We_ meaning you and me or you and him?”

“I hadn’t decided yet.”

“And if it was me.”

“Stop toying with that boy because …” he looked up at her and paused. “Do you _want_ to be dating Blake?”

“Could be worse,” she shrugged and avoided his eye. “I could be lusting after you.”

“I’m gay, sweetheart,” Wells said in his patiently disgruntled way. 

“That doesn’t mean I can’t lust after your hot bod.”

“Are you going to stop being obnoxious and answer the question or…?”

Raven looked studiously back down at the wires in her hands, that were worse off now than when she had started toying with them, “If I didn’t want to be, then I wouldn’t be.”

Wells shifted closer to her and nudged her gently, “That’s not really an answer.”

“Yes,” she swallowed hard. 

They sat in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts. She wondered if there was a rule about this sort of thing, should she have asked about Monty and Miller when that started, was she falling down on some undefined duties?

“Does he know?” Wells finally asked. 

Raven leaned away from him, “What do you mean?”

“I mean… does he know that you are … _together_?”

“How could he not know?”

“You don’t really seem to know,” Wells pointed out pragmatically. 

“Does that mean...?” she stared in Wells in horror as he bent over in laughter. 

“Oh _shit_ I wish I could be in the room when you have _this_ conversation.”

Raven groaned. 

 

Like any reasonable adult, Raven avoided Bellamy for a few days, trying to work up the courage to ask him… she wasn’t sure what exactly. He didn’t seem to notice that she was awkward and stiff around him, but it made her feel miserable. She’d preferred things the way they’d been, before she’d said anything to Wells, before she’d realized that maybe they needed to have some kind of conversation about what was happening in their tent when no one else could see. 

She should have gone straight to Bellamy and had a mature, respectful conversation with him. 

Instead, she found herself in the entrance to Octavia’s cave, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t blurt out _so does your brother **like** me like me or…?_ because she was already embarrassed enough. 

“Nope,” Octavia shook her head the minute she saw Raven lurking around. “Wells warned me about you, my lips are sealed.”

“You don’t know why I’m here,” Raven pointed out. 

Octavia folded her arms over her chest, “If you try to tell me you’re in love with me, I’ll slap you and then tell Lincoln he can throw you in the river. He’s been wanting to see whether you’ll float or sink.”

Raven wrinkled her nose, “Wait, what?”

“I think it’s a Grounder joke and he won’t explain it to me,” Octavia rolled her eyes. “Now go talk to Bell, and leave me out of it.”

Raven squared her shoulders and turned back towards camp.

“Hey Raven!” Octavia called out. Raven turned around and waited. “Just so you know, Lincoln and Indra have taught me some very clever ways to kill people. If you hurt him even a little bit, I’ll be more than happy to practice on you.” She smiled brightly and Raven smiled back, feeling a little relieved. 

As she made her way through camp, she saw Miller sorting through a pile of firewood and after a moment’s hesitation, she walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. “If you hurt him,” she said without preamble, “I’ll hurt you.” She waited for him to respond and when he didn’t she backed up a step, “Just wanted to make sure that was clear.”

Miller chuckled softly, “Aren’t you a little late?”

“A death threat is only late if the person is already dead,” she countered. “Anyway, I wasn’t really informed of the rules until recently so…” she let her voice trail off. 

The only person in her life that would have gone around her back threatening people would have been Finn, and he would have had to threaten himself. Not that it would have done any good, turned out. 

He smiled at her, “I _had_ planned on breaking his heart tomorrow over dinner, but you’ve made me see the light.”

“Just so long as we’re on the same page,” she said with a smile, turning away and heading slowly back to her tent. After a few steps a horrifying thought crossed her mind and she turned back. “Did… I mean… this conversation,” she pitched her voice into a near-whisper, “has Wells …”

“Said anything to Bellamy?” He laughed at her facial expression and patted her on the back kindly, “I think they’re long past that.” 

That sounded suspicious as hell, but she let it go in favor of mulling darkly over the fact that apparently everyone in camp knew what was going on between her and Bellamy except her. 

It rained that night and after giving her a stern lecture for walking out to see Octavia when she really shouldn’t strain her back and leg so much, Bellamy curled himself around her back, sliding his leg between hers so that her leg was elevated and less pressure fell on her hip and spine. She had always slept on her side all her life and after her surgery, there was no way to do so comfortably. On her back she felt cold and exposed, on her stomach she felt like she was suffocating, it was Bellamy that realized she was waking up in the morning more sore and tired than rested and figured out a way to help her return to her comfort zone. She fell asleep with his breath hot on her neck and his arm draped gently over her waist, just like every night. 

 

“Where are you going?” she was tired and pissed off at Jones and wanted nothing more than to curl up in front of a roaring fire with Bellamy and bitch to him about her day and wait for him to fix it or say something sarcastic that would make her laugh or punch him but at the very least be distracting and here he was, packing. 

He didn’t look up, “Small skirmish between Camp Jaha and the Ice Nation last night. Wells and I are going up there.”

“Oh,” she stood there and realized she didn’t know what to say or how to explain that the idea of him leaving made her feel like clawing at her own skin. 

Bellamy grinned at her, “Jackson probably has some illegal parts for you to play with.” Camp Jaha had a larger population, more supplies in general, and consequently could afford to send groups out on scouting missions. Jackson always set aside whatever they didn’t use for Raven to pick through. 

“Yeah,” Raven shrugged. 

He looked over at her for a moment and then set his pack down, crossing the length of the tent and wrapping his arms around her gently, tucking her head under his chin. 

After a long moment, their breathing coming together in perfect synch, Raven raised her arms to press him closer to her, “Do you miss me when you’re gone?” She tried to make it sound like she was teasing him, but her voice caught in her throat a little, giving away too much. 

Bellamy pressed a kiss into the top of her head, “Every moment.”

She relaxed into his embrace, slowly, finally, and he tightened his grip around her, as if he had been waiting for that tiny sign. And maybe everything changed right then, or maybe this was how it had always been and she’d been too closed off to admit it to herself. 

She should have known, to be fair. 

It wasn’t like she didn’t understand that Bellamy Blake didn’t do anything by half. 

It wasn’t like she didn’t understand that Raven Reyes didn’t do anything in the right order. 

“Hey Bellamy!” Miller called from outside their tent, “You’re burning daylight! We gotta go!” 

Bellamy stepped away from her and smiled, reached the back of his hand up to trace her jawline, a callous under one knuckle scratching at her skin, “Let Jones and Fox help you tomorrow?”

She shoved him, “Come back alive and I’ll think about it.”

He laughed and then rolled his eyes when Miller started shouting at him again. 

Monty brought over a card game and dinner that night, and Harper dropped off some of her latest batch of moonshine. They didn’t like talking about the fact that every time one of their groups left the safety of the camp, that might be the last they were seen, but on nights when someone was gone, everyone rallied around each other. That night, and the night after, Monty and Raven slept back-to-back, waiting for their people to come home. 

 

He felt the explosion before he saw it, the ground rumbling beneath his feet moments before they heard it. Wells grabbed his arm and then they were running, sprinting for home. 

“If she’s not dead, I’ll kill her,” Wells shouted. 

“Get in line,” Bellamy bellowed over his shoulder. 

 

It wasn’t that she was bored. She would have gone for a swim or taken a couple of days to visit Anya if she had just been looking for something to feel the time. It wasn’t even that she was restless – which she was. And bored. 

But those two things had nothing to do with it. 

She was fucking scared. 

“Remind me how this is a good idea again?” Jones asked hesitantly, squinting up the cave shaft where Raven was bent over yelling down at him. 

“It’s _not_ a good idea. But it’s all we got, so light the fuse and run like hell.”

One of Octavia’s kids had mentioned the tunnels a few months back and no decisions had ever been made regarding them. Whether they were mines or an old shelter would be determined when and if they ever had the spare manpower to send a team in to investigate, but in the meantime winter wasn’t going to suddenly not happen. Raven had honestly forgotten about it until she had been left in charge of the camp on her own. 

A quick trip to Camp Jaha for a couple of days had stretched out to weeks without any word.

At first, preparations for winter kept her busy, getting used to a routine that included Wells and Bellamy’s tasks as well as her own kept her awake more nights than she slept, but eventually it died down. Either that or everyone was just waiting for the others to come back, maybe she’d scared them all off. Regardless, the days started to crawl by and whatever fear she had was reflected in every pair of eyes that she met while shuffling through camp every day. 

“Your boyfriend picked a really stellar time to disappear on us,” she lashed out one afternoon at no one in particular. 

“Think she’s talking to you or me?” Monty hissed to Octavia. 

“Herself, probably,” Octavia said. 

They tried to keep spirits up, tried to pretend that everything was alright, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she had no idea what the hell was happening. There was no real reason to be worried, not really. 

She had John tighten patrols and began an earlier curfew that only a few of the older kids ignored – which didn’t bother her, if she was honest. 

After four weeks, they needed a project – a distraction.

“It’ll just be a _little_ explosion,” she argued. 

“That could end up collapsing all of the tunnels permanently instead of opening up that one section,” Jones shouted up, the device already in his hands, but fighting her to the last. 

“You know she’s not going to give up,” Monroe called out from somewhere behind Raven. 

“Trust me,” Raven said, turning away. “I know what I’m doing… I hope.”

“ _I HEARD THAT!_ ” Jones called after her. 

It was actually a much smaller explosion than she was expecting and Octavia opted to take that as a good sign. Jones refused to lower himself back down into the tunnels until the next morning, something about waiting for the dust to settle and natural light, but she had a really good feeling that it had worked, her little experiment. Monty just shook his head and tromped back to camp. 

As she walked back to camp with the others, Raven wondered if they had heard her handiwork all the way up at Camp Jaha. She winced. Indra and Anya were probably already organizing scouts to go ensure that it wasn’t those assholes from Mt. Weather again. They’d been quiet for the past month or so before Bellamy and Wells … anyway all their neighbors were well aware of Raven’s penchant for creating loud noises even in times of peace. At the most, a few Grounder scouts would make their way through camp over the next week and that would be the end of it.

Harper insisted that they all eat together in the clearing outside Raven’s tent, she’d been experimenting all week with some herbs Lincoln had brought her and they were all doing their best to be enthusiastic about the results. It was easy and not easy, sitting around the fire laughing and talking into the night, when there were faces missing that shouldn’t have been. There was an empty space between Monty and Octavia that only she could see – where Lincoln should have been – a lull in the conversation that Wells’ voice should have filled, a joke that fell flat because Miller wasn’t there to enjoy it. A chill at her back because… 

Raven stood up, causing everyone to look up at her with worried looks. “Chill guys, just gotta pee,” she rolled her eyes at them. 

Jones made a crack about her small bladder – which was pretty notorious around camp, ever since her surgery she felt like she had to hobble out to the latrine fifty times a day. She smiled but didn’t shoot a retort over her shoulder, just let the sound of their laughter wash over her as she picked her way to the private latrine she and Bellamy had designed behind their tent – far enough away that there never was a smell-factor, but close enough that she could get there in the middle of the night when her back ached and her leg weighed an inexplicable five hundred pounds. 

The sound of the night and the group around the fire filtered through the air and her mind slid to the one thing that it kept circling back to – how to survive if this was it, if this was all there was, if they really weren’t coming back. How to keep going on their own. 

How to keep going on _her_ own. 

Raven leaned her back against the tree and propped her bad leg up on the root system on the other side of the hole, sliding her pants down to her knees as she lowered her body lower, her good leg steadily bending below her. Squatting was a fucking pain in the ass no matter what, and having one leg that refused to follow command made it that much more difficult. Most days she was lucky not to topple over into the hole of waste every time she tried to evacuate her bowels. The latrines behind her tent and workshop were designed to ensure she never fell, but that didn’t make it any easier. 

Abby kept telling her that one day it would feel like second-nature, one day she wouldn’t even remember what it was like before. Raven highly doubted this. She could _remember_ running, her feet pounding against the ground and the wind cool on her face. She could remember squatting and jumping and dancing. And she never wanted to not remember. 

Raven shook her head and yanked her pants back over her waist, standing up unsteadily and placing the cover back over the hole. She could get used to anything. 

Someone back at the campire was shouting. 

She swore under her breath and picked up the pace slightly, her lower back twinging in protest. Apparently she could also get used to being the person that broke up fights and arranged trade deals and made sure Octavia didn’t get herself killed. She could get used to this, to doing this alone. Hell, she’d just peed without falling over or losing her balance, she could get used to anything. 

“RAVEN!!!”

Right as she stepped into the light of the fire, unseen because everyone was standing up and had their backs to her for some reason – too lost in her own thoughts to think that strange until they all turned to stare at her, Bellamy started shouting at her. 

She blinked up at him as he pushed his way through the small collection of people and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her violently. “Bellamy?!” in her own head she sounded like one of the actresses from before the Ark in the movies they would sometimes show in the common hall. She sounded stupid, breathless, like she’s the one sweating and panting. 

“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? I THOUGHT…” his grip tightened on her shoulders and he swallowed. “I thought something had happened to you.”

He took a little half-step towards her, as if he was going to hug her or, she didn’t want to know what at that moment because if she thought about it she’d stop seeing red and she really, really wanted to hold onto the anger that was bubbling up inside of her right then. She pushed him away, _hard_ , both hands on his chest and all of the strength left in her after a long day. He stumbled back, tripping over his feet, eyes wide and wild in his sweaty face. 

“You have. _No. Right._ ” she narrowed his eyes at him, her voice nearly a whisper. 

“Raven,” he reached his arms towards her again and she flinched back. “We heard the explosion… I thought…”

“You have no right,” she pushed out from between clenched teeth. 

The past five weeks flashed before her eyes, thinking he was dead, that ray of hope that dwindled away into nothing. Maybe they were nothing. 

“You can’t just go around blowing things up!” his voice was rising again. 

Good. 

“I can blow up whatever the fuck I want,” Raven countered, eyes flashing. “How are you going to stop me _if you aren’t even here_?!”

“You CAN’T just make decisions like this for yourself, Raven!”

“A decision _had_ to be made and so I made it!”

“That’s not how it works!”

Everyone was staring. They were drawing a crowd.

Good. 

Raven smiled, slow and feline, a sudden heavy calm settling over her, “So glad our fearless leader is back to put me in my place. I don’t know how we survived two days without you,” she scanned his face, waiting for a wince or some fucking guilt or at least that moment of dawning recognition that he was the one that fucking walked away, not her. “Thank you for being so clarifying.”

And then she turned her back on all of them, walked to the tent, and began throwing each and everything that belonged to Bellamy Blake out onto the ground outside. Most of their things they shared – the thin blankets, the pad they slept on, the dishes, she kept those things. Out went his extra shirt and the bag full of shiny rocks that one of the kids in Camp Jaha kept giving to him that he was hoping to someday fashion into marbles somehow and the couple of books he’d traded the more friendly Wastelanders for, all of it went flying through the entrance of her tent. 

When she was finished, she walked proudly back outside, chin high. “I hope this was _as_ clarifying for _you_ ,” she bit out. 

Most of the group had scattered, showing a rare sign of respect for privacy, but she could still see a few people lingering around the campfire. 

Octavia’s wide eyes watching Bellamy warily. 

Monty sprawled across Wells and Miller’s laps. 

_Traitor_ she thought bitterly. 

Bellamy stood staring at her, one shoulder a bit lower than the other as if something was trying to press him down. 

She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned onto her good leg, waiting. 

“Raven, I’m so---“

“Stop,” she cut him off, suddenly worried that if she heard his lame apology that she’d forgive him. And she wasn’t ready to forgive him. Not for disappearing for weeks without a word. Not for shouting at her. Not for belittling her. Not for making her feel like maybe she belonged to someone again. 

She looked him up and down and hoped desperately that her voice wouldn’t give her away, “You’re mistaking me for someone who cares.”

 

He was staying with Octavia while Lincoln was away – not that she cared where he was or what he was doing, It seemed lately like he was the only thing that anyone in camp talked about. She suspected that they only talked about him when she was nearby, waiting for a reaction from her. 

Raven wouldn’t deign to give them any. 

She went about her life as if he weren’t there, as if he’d never existed, as if she hadn’t thrown him out of her tent, (as if she couldn’t sleep without him pressed up against her). 

It was surprisingly easy to pretend as though Bellamy Blake didn’t occupy the same space as her, that he wasn’t always two yards away or two minutes behind, primarily because he stayed out of her way as much as possible. She opted to leave the war planning to Wells and Bellamy, focusing her energy on the mine shaft her little explosion had opened up into an underground bunker with mostly untouched supplies. It wasn’t much, but it distracted the camp from the hushed conversations in Well’s lean-to, kept them focused on something good for once. 

She told herself that her pride in giving the camp good news wasn’t at all petty. It was a pretty story, but it didn’t keep her warm at night. 

Two weeks of stilted silence passed and then Lincoln returned. 

He came right to Raven’s workshop, stood in the doorway silently, looking as though he had just taken a jaunt through the woods and had only been gone five minutes.

“You’re alive,” she’d said, then shooed him away from the door brusquely. “Get the hell out of my light.”

He smiled and moved further into her workshop, ducking under the low roof. There was a bag of scrap metal and parts in his hand, she took it from him and set to work cataloguing and examining each piece. Lincoln settled himself down in a corner to watch and wait. 

Sometimes, when they sat together like this, she wondered if there was any bad blood lingering between them – or if it was the thick history of them that kept them circling back to each other in silence so often. With Octavia, there was always, always noise. She talked into the air until Raven stopped her with a song. Wells came to her with questions, now more than in the past. Needing her as a crutch for his frustration and self-doubt; their long silences now replaced with to-do lists too long to cope with and priorities lying elsewhere. Clarke, when she was around, was so brimming with nervous energy that even silence seemed full of sound. The others didn’t stick around long enough to know what sitting in silence with Raven Reyes felt like, and with Lincoln it felt heavy and comfortable and warm. Like they had known each other from the Ark and beyond, or like it didn’t matter that they didn’t know where the other came from, because they were in the same place now and _that_ was what mattered. 

After an hour or so, she whipped around and looked at him curiously, “What do you want?”

He looked steadily at her and she braced herself for a lecture about apologies and forgiveness, which was all that Wells was passing out these days. “What?”

“Why… are you _here_?” she gestured at her junk pile and herself. 

He looked around and smiled, “It is quiet here.”

Around noon, he left for a while and came back with lunch for the both of them and a fresh bucket of water for her shop. The next day he was back, lurking in the corner with some whittling and saying nothing. 

Despite the fact that she was ignoring everyone, gossip was still gossip and was as unavoidable as the plague or Harper when she was in a bad mood. Or Harper when she was in a good mood. During the three days that she had Lincoln skulking around the corners of her workshop while Jones and Monroe were out at the tunnels, bringing back anything they could find from the bunker, gossip seemed to suggest that Lincoln had information that Wells wanted, but was unwilling to share. 

On the fourth day, Raven barred him entrance to her tent, “Are you hiding out here to avoid Wells?”

“No.”

She stepped back a little, “Oh.” She squinted at him, “Are you hiding from someone else?”

“It is quiet here,” Lincoln said firmly, took her by the shoulders and gently moved her out of the way so that he could walk past her into the tent. 

A few minutes later, she burst into laughter. “The Blakes are arguing about something aren’t they?”

Lincoln muttered something that sounded like _Caligula_ and nodded his head. 

It was the first time she’d voluntarily spoken to anyone about Bellamy in weeks. 

“What does Wells want from you?” she could ask him something like this point-blank. Anyone else would need a warm up, some small talk, a context. After all this time, she trusted Lincoln to know what she needed him to hear. 

“War,” Lincoln said darkly and then went back to his whittling. Anyone else would need context, specifics, a rhyming couplet. After all this time, he trusted Raven to know what he needed her to hear. 

 

Lincoln eventually left her workspace, it got a little crowded when Jones and Monroe came back from the bunker, but still brought her lunch when he could.

Whether he said it or not, that handful of days he spent crouched in the corner of her workshop with his whittling and thoughts were absolutely an avoidance tactic and the second that space was occupied, Lincoln threw himself into the thick of whatever political plans Wells and Bellamy were concocting. Somehow kicking Bellamy out had created a force-field around her that prevented even Wells from disturbing her much-needed peace and quiet. She had a bunker and a bunch of weird, ancient-looking trinkets, and they had a war. 

 

While Bellamy was gone on his five-week crusade or whatever the fuck they were doing (she never asked and no one seemed willing to offer up an explanation, even Wells) Raven got accustomed to doing things alone. Fetching water, cooking up dinners, washing her clothes; before it had been two people and then it was just her. She was okay with it being just her and honestly – she told herself – kicking Bellamy out left her with more room in the tent and less shit to deal with. 

Taking care of one person had to be easier than taking care of two, right?

Three days after Lincoln stopped hiding in her work-tent, she woke up to find a fresh bucket of water waiting for her outside. It was difficult, walking down to the well and back home every morning before heading across camp to her shop. She’d even considered moving her tent to being closer to her work area, but she liked her tent where it was, liked being able to walk away from her work at the end of the day, liked living in a space removed a bit from the rest of camp – even if it made some of her day just slightly more complicated. 

At lunch, she’d thanked Lincoln for the water as they sat in her work-tent, chewing the tough flatbread Harper and Monty had been working on perfecting all week. At his questioning expression, Raven faltered. 

“If not me, then who?” Lincoln asked her, a wry smile on his face. 

She thought about throwing water in his face or sulking, but she couldn’t. He wasn’t Wells, they didn’t tease in that way. Instead she waited a beat and then said, “How’s Caligula?”

If there was ever a moment when Lincoln would have been well within his rights to give her a stern lecture about taking Bellamy back (as if he was hers to give and take as she pleased), it would have been that moment. 

But he wasn’t Wells, they didn’t tease in that way. 

“Oh… I think after today, a new topic of conversation will present itself.”

 

First, it was the water. Fresh water outside her tent morning and evening. And then it was also dinner, hot and waiting. On laundry day she came home to find her clothes clean and dry. She didn’t mention it to anyone but Lincoln – though Wells and Monty kept staring at her and Monty in particular seemed rather hurt that she didn’t seem at all affected by it. Bellamy’s name was on everyone’s lips, but she hadn’t actually _seen_ his face since he’d returned from Camp Jaha. A fact that was in and of itself a small miracle, considering that their camp’s population was around ninety and she felt as though she saw each of those ninety faces at least three times in the span of a day. It wasn’t an easy place to hide. 

Raven had an invisible fairy godmother and she was perfectly content to let him stay invisible as long as he fucking wanted to play it that way. 

First, it was the water and chores, the day-to-day things that she realized once he left that she had never thought about or noticed, because he’d always done them. 

She wondered if there were things that _she_ did, chores and tasks, that he didn’t notice until she pushed him out of their… _her_ tent. Was she as imbedded in his life as he was in hers?

First, it was the chores and then it was little gifts. A bar of real soap, a tool she’d been coveting, a new shirt in her tent. 

“He’s being a coward,” she grumbled one day to Lincoln. It had been two weeks of this, invisible fairy Bellamy running around the camp and making her life _easier_ , it was starting to get on her last nerve. 

Lincoln didn’t say anything. 

“You are no fun to talk to,” she said, smiling at him. “You’re supposed to tell me that I’m being a bitch or … to take the high road or…”

“Tell you how romantic it is?” 

“You hear enough about this at home,” she interpreted, the idea that Octavia’s hand was in all of this a presumption long ago established. 

Lincoln shrugged and took another bite of Harper’s flatbread. It was actually getting pretty good. 

“Is this the part where you tell me to take him off your hands?” she pushed, curious to know how it would feel to _hear_ it finally spoken aloud. 

_Take Bellamy back._

As if she had ever possessed him in the first place. 

“No,” Lincoln turned to look at her. “Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know,” Raven said honestly. 

It was almost like he was back, because his presence was everywhere, in everything she did, in every moment of the day. Except that he wasn’t, he was still hiding with his sister in the cave across the stream, she hadn’t seen him in weeks and yet there he was, haunting her every step like a fucking ghost. A ghost she couldn’t rail and scream at because he wasn’t actually invisible, just avoiding her. 

It had been easier when he was really gone, when he wasn’t lurking about, reminding her about what could have been if he hadn’t disappeared, if everything hadn’t gone wrong. 

When he was gone, she didn’t feel the need to mourn. Now her life was littered with his presence but she couldn’t have _him_. 

It was fucking infuriating. 

It was like he was wooing her without actually wooing her; without giving her the chance to say no. 

Without giving her the chance to say yes. 

 

“You do realize that it’s been close to ten weeks since you saw him last, like really saw him,” Wells pointed out over dinner. 

Monty and Miller exchanged glances and then swept away, pressing kisses to Wells’ cheeks and the top of Raven’s head on the way out. 

“You wait all this time to say something and all you’ve got is _it’s been a long time_ ,” she narrowed her eyes at him. “I _know_ how fucking long it’s been.”

She’d been there, every day and every hour, holding herself together and pushing through and finding projects and tasks to spend her time on so that she didn’t have to sit and watch the hours and days go by between saying goodbye and that moment. 

“I’m just saying…” 

“You’re not saying anything I don’t already know. It’s been nine weeks and four days and twenty-two hours since Miller came looking for him so you three could take off to Camp Jaha. _I know how fucking long it’s been_.” Raven blinked at Wells and then looked down at her lap. 

Sometimes, without meaning to, she gave so, so much away. 

“My sister is a fucking moron,” Wells said softly to himself before moving around to sit beside her and wrap his arm around her shoulder. “You are in love with him you dummy.”

Raven tried to push him away, but he held her tightly against him, and she didn’t want to cause another fight. 

She didn’t want to fight at all. 

Fighting wasn’t in her nature, it was just what she had always done. Fought to eat, fought to live, fought to survive, fought to walk, fought to love. It was everything she knew but it wasn’t everything she wanted to be, it couldn’t be everything she was. 

“No I’m not.”

Wells just laughed and kept his arm wrapped around her shoulders until the fire dwindled down to its last sparks.

When he stood up to leave, she said softly – so softly she’d like to think that he didn’t hear, “I’m not, but I could.”

“So then do it.”

Raven shook her head, “Maybe we’re better off…”

“What? As friends? Girl you’ve never been _just friends_ with Blake,” he smiled at her, all of their time outside the Skybox lurking there behind his eyes. He knew better than anyone here, better than anyone alive, he knew who she was before and who she had become. “You came barreling out of the sky and the first thing you did was straddle that boy in the middle of the woods.”

“He stole my radio!”

“There’s a thousand different ways you could have solved that. I was there, remember?”

She had a retort on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it because it didn’t much matter. This was a stupid argument, anyway. 

Wells gave her a pitying look, “Figure it out.”

Raven sat alone in front of the smoking remains of the campfire until the sun started to peek over the edge of the horizon. 

 

“You have to stop.”

Bellamy gaped at her. He had just seen John go into her work-tent with a pissed off look on his face and if there was anything that got hot-headed Raven Reyes into a thirty-minute rant it was John Mbege when he was feeling pompous. Which was nearly always. That had been only about five minutes ago and yet, here she was, staring him down in her tent. 

And there he was, visible and with a bucket full of water in his hand. 

“Stop what?” Because deniability was always an option.

Raven took a deep breath and it shuddered low in her spine, “You can’t keep doing this. I need you to stop.”

“Then let me move back,” he was moving quickly from denial to bargaining, but oh well. There was too much on the line to not switch tactics as many times as necessary in order to see this through. 

“No,” she shook her head and backed up a pace. 

“You need help—“

“NO!” The force of her protest surprised them both, Raven breathed heavily for a moment before shaking her head, “No I don’t. I don’t need _your_ help.”

This conversation was clearly not going in the way either one had planned and so they ended up on pause for a long moment, not sure where to go or what to say. 

Bellamy thought about the moment right before he had left, standing right there in this tent, with her pressed up against him, her arms around him and nothing between them anymore. It had all been right there, on the edge of becoming something. Something that wasn’t hard and cruel, something that he could have held on to until it felt like he had never known anything else. 

Fuck it. 

He slammed the bucket on the ground and took a step towards her, “Well, I want to do it. I _want_ to help you.”

“Too bad,” she said, her eyes full and her voice caught somewhere in her throat. 

Bellamy crossed the length of the small space and stopped just shy of grabbing her, his hands raised up, but he hesitated at the last moment. “I thought about you every day. All I wanted was to get back here, back to this shitty little tent, back to you.”

“Bell—“

“No,” his face hardened. “Goddamnit Raven I get to say this, you said what you wanted now it’s my turn.”

“I nev—“

“No!”

She glared at him mutinously and gestured for him to finish, folding her arms over her chest. 

She was so damn stubborn and beautiful and the biggest pain in the ass and all he wanted to do in that moment was kiss her, kiss her hard and slow, but he was afraid that if he did he’d lose everything. “I thought maybe what I missed was having someone to take care of, that it wasn’t about you at all.” It was the cruelest way to say it, but it was the only way. “So I did all the things that I’d been missing. And…” he slumped down, breathing heavy, “It wasn’t enough.”

 _You weren’t enough._

A tear trickled down her cheek and she didn’t even bother to wipe it away. Okay, so she wasn’t enough that’s just fucking perfect. “I can take care of _myself_ ,” she whispered. And then she poked him in the chest a little, trying to work herself up into an anger she wasn’t ready to feel yet. “You want to take care of someone, go find one of your groupies or your sister. I’m not going to be your charity case anymore.”

“Raven, that’s not—“

“If you are going to leave then you need to _leave_!” she was losing her grip on this situation and it was all his fault. “This back and forth shit is … no. I’m not living like this anymore. Get the hell out!”

“Raven are you even listening to me?!” he grabbed her shoulders, the contact making her flinch slightly. “I love you, you stubborn pain in the ass and _I’m not going anywhere_.”

She stared at him, eyes wide and he took a step back, dropping his hands. 

“I mean… I’ll leave if that’s what you really want,” he ran a hand through his hair. “I just… missed _you_ and this---“

Raven grabbed him by the back of his neck and pulled him down to her, pressing her lips against his greedily. When she pulled away, he was shaking, his forehead pressed against hers and his hands pressed against the skin of her lower back. 

“I hate you,” she whispered.

“I know,” he smiled down at her, every cell in his body screaming at him to kiss her again and again and again and to never let her go, she just might fly away. 

Every beginning has its fits and starts. 

He felt famous as he went about the rest of his day, dropping Raven off at her work-tent before finishing his extensive to-do list, every eye in camp watching his every move until it’s more comfortable to just hide away in Octavia’s cave for a few hours.

“Who do you think won the betting pool?” Raven asked, naked from head to toe and draped comfortably against his chest. 

“Guessing from the mooning looks Monty was giving me at dinner, he lost,” Bellamy mused, pressing a kiss against her temple, already bored with any conversation piece that doesn’t end with her shivering beneath his hands and tongue. 

“Betcha Miller won,” she rolled onto her stomach to look at him. 

He shook his head, “Lincoln.”

“What will you give me?” When she smiled like that he felt like he could disappear into a burst of flames and it all would have been worth it. 

“Everything,” he stroked her back lazily with his fingertips. “Anything you want.”

“If I win, you eat me out.”

He considered for a moment, as though there was something in that win that didn’t serve him just as much as her. “I’ll take it.”

“And if you win,” she joked, “I promise to work on my pillow talk.”

“Let’s start now,” he’d replied, flipping her over unceremoniously and kissing a trail down her stomach. She forgot all about the bet. 

Fox was a little more difficult to get information out of than usual, but eventually Bellamy got her to confess that Connor had been in charge of the betting pool and that Lincoln had won. The next day, Harper sidled up to Raven and asked her to _keep it down for fuck’s sake, my tent isn’t that far from yours, you know?_ and then had demanded details. 

Which was how Raven found out that she’d lost.


	4. permanence is an act that can change every day if you let it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> planning for the wedding continues ... Sachel continues to be the most long-suffering character of all time and Bellamy continues to be the most easily-manipulated "big brother" in the village. also contains more bets, discussion of clothing, and language stuff.

“Get out of here, Blake. I have enough going on.”

“I’m here to help, don’t be such a dick.”

Miller had served at Bellamy’s side since the dropship, through the war they were never far from each other’s side – half out of an unspoken loyalty to each other and probably half for the sake of who was waiting for them back home. Yet in all that time, Bellamy had never seen Miller so relieved as he did at that moment. 

“Are you serious or did Raven put you up to it?” He shook his head, “Doesn’t matter, I don’t care. Here—“ Miller pulled him into the makeshift tent that was the wedding home office as far as Bellamy could tell. 

He stood awkwardly in a corner while Miller sorted through the stack of papers on his desk. He hadn’t seen that much paper since the height of the Weather War. 

Miller looked up at him sheepishly, “Every clan sends about three requests a week since this whole fucking thing started. It’s been hell just keeping everything straight and Raven refuses to even look at them, even if half of them are addressed to her.”

Bellamy eased closed to the table, “What do they want?”

“What _don’t_ they want?” Miller spat out. “Nia has sent _five_ messages changing the size of her personal guard. Clarke has reminded us three times that Lexa dislikes any food with seaweed in it. Caris seems to think that we’ve never thrown a party before and keeps sending pages of advice that all seems contradictory. Indra promised us some workers to help with the building plans but…”

Bellamy rested a hand on his shoulder, “Let me sort through this.”

Miller sagged, “I’ll be outside the wall with the building team.”

“What are you building?”

“Temporary housing,” Miller fixed him with a curious look.

“We’re building _houses_?! For everyone that’s coming?”

“Not _everyone_ , because Wells can’t peg down how many people are coming. The chiefs and Lexa will have housing inside the wall and anyone who has family here will stay with them, which takes care of a lot actually.”

Bellamy rubbed a hand over his face, “So how many are you planning outside the wall?”

“About fifteen. Ten by the river and another five by the back west gate.”

“And inside the wall?”

“Five.” Miller sighed and rubbed the top of his head, causing his customary black beanie to slide forward on his forehead. 

“The five inside the wall should be permanent,” Bellamy said, looking down at the stacks of papers. “Make it clear that there will always be guest housing available for people when they come. Right now, Anya and Indra have to bunk with Raven and I when they come and it’s cramped. Not a bad idea to have some place for them to go.”

Miller nodded, “Sure.”

“After this mess we can do a lottery for those in the village that want an upgrade, we’ll only keep one empty on a permanent basis,” Bellamy added thoughtfully. 

“You got it, boss,” Miller said distractedly, the gears in his head obviously turning.

Bellamy rolled his eyes at the title, but pressed forward, “How long?”

“What.”

“How long until the damn wedding?”

“Three months.”

“Fuck.”

“That’s the general consensus, yeah,” Miller shot him a smile as he ducked out of the tent. 

As Miller’s commanding shouts to his team filtered through the tent, Bellamy looked down at the mess he’d just volunteered to take over and sighed. 

 

Life on the ground aged a person. 

Not that living on the Ark guaranteed anyone a longer lifespan. The elderly took away from the limited resources of the newest generation, for most that meant a quiet farewell and a trip to the Medical Bay. No one was really sure what happened there, the medical professionals left off their exact explanations until the actual moment. Out of fear or mystery or just general secrecy, Bellamy was never sure. Some asked to wait. 

Aurora told him a thousand times about her mother, Monica, who held him for his first moments and then disappeared the next day into the Medical Bay without saying a word to her daughter. _She held you and named you and loved you and died so happy,_ she would whisper to him late at night when he was small and couldn’t sleep. 

Walking through a Grounder village, it wasn’t that the elderly were _missed_ in any conscious way, their eyes didn’t seek them out, but signs of age and wear were new and startling in the beginning. 

“It makes sense they would choose Lexa as a leader when she was so young,” Raven murmured on their way back home after their first visit to Tondc with Lincoln and Octavia. 

“Why?” Bellamy slowed his pace to match her uneven one, placing his feet carefully and steadily on the rough ground. 

“Time moves faster here.” 

He’d dragged his fingertips gently across her lower back at the words, conscious always of the fragmented shards that nearly stopped her. As if anything could bring her to a stop. It seemed inconceivable. 

They weren’t nothing but they weren’t quite _something_ except in moments when he felt as though she was his own voice that dared to speak his fears aloud. 

“We’ll survive this,” he’d responded, his voice gruff even as his fingers were gentle and his head dipped to hear her words and his long, strong legs kept pace with hers. 

And that had felt like something. 

Her leg aches before a rain and he’ll never tell her, but there’s an old scar on the back of one thigh that itches during thunderstorms. They carry their age on their skin being on the Ground. 

And that feels like something else. 

 

She entered the tent just as he cracked his knuckles loudly, a ripple of bones cracking and popping not the best greeting she’d had that day, but not the worst, either. This wedding was making people crazy, probably her most of all. Raven had noticed the mottled bones of the older Grounder women, the ones that sold her the yarn and thread and better cloth for Bellamy’s work, they smiled softly at her and knew that she wasn’t the one the goods were for. 

You could tell a person by their hands. 

Not what a person does. On the Ark, people were what they did. You went on a blind date with someone from another station, you met in the hallway, you shared smiles in the cafeteria, and the first question that was asked was, _What do you do?_ What is your purpose? How do you keep us floating?

(What had she done? She’d come crashing down, she’d given up on floating and had never apologized.)  
(What had she been? She never looked back at that.)

The Grounder women taught her without speaking how to tell a person and how to know that what a person _was_ and what a person _did_ were never as connected as one might think. Sometimes, it meant everything. 

Mostly it meant nothing at all. 

The war lasted longer than she liked to remember. Days upon endless days stuck with maps and plans and missives from places she couldn’t get to, an empty bunk at the end of the night, Monty’s soft, apologetic smile in the morning. 

They knew what she was before she opened her mouth, saw her moving through the threadbare crowd, grimacing down at children, handing her tools and scraps of metal and wire. Her broken Trigedasleng in those days made them smile and _tsk_ at her gently. They’d taken her hands in theirs and pointed to the scars and marks that she didn’t notice, the burn marks, the callouses in places that told them exactly what she was. 

She never learned what they learned exactly. Something that tasted like fear held her back. 

Raven never liked being broken down into her moving parts. 

Maybe it had been a trick to sell her what they wanted off their hands, maybe her hands didn’t say anything about her at all, but she had still learned to _look_. 

She knew that when Miller’s hands shook it was more from fear that fatigue. That sometimes Wells would stare down at his palms as if they held the answers to the universe or his future or his past and that if he didn’t seek her out by the end of the day something was seriously wrong. She knew that Monty’s fingernails were always caked with dark soil no matter how much he scrubbed them. She knew that Fox’s cuticles bled when she was frustrated because she chewed them off. She knew that the scar across Lincoln’s left palm could predict a lightning storm down to the hour. She knew that Monroe’s right pinkie finger rubbed at her palm when she was lying. She knew that Harper would rub the smooth backs of her fingernails against her lip when she was thinking dirty thoughts. 

She knew an immeasurable amount of things about Bellamy’s hands and when she watched him bend down over his makeshift clothes with a small needle in one hand, that she was in danger of losing his hands to arthritis. 

He looked up at her, eyes open wide and she just smiled, but didn’t say anything. There were decades still ahead of him before his back stooped and his knuckles got in the way of him doing the thing that made him feel useful. 

She was looking too far into the future, she was getting comfortable. She was making plans for when he was old and grey and still saw him sitting beside her. 

Funny, that. 

 

Bellamy looked down at the page in his hands and then back at the two smiling teenage girls peering up at him hopefully. They were going to be no fucking help. He turned his head, “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Is the bride fourteen? Should I also arrange a unicorn to carry her down the aisle?”

Indra glared back impassively. 

“She’s _seventeen_ and she’ll walk down the aisle on her own two feet,” Echo said over her shoulder as she walked away. “I took her measurements just like you told me to. You got this.”

Bellamy huffed slightly and tried not to wince at the way Reese and Mel’s faces fell at his reaction. He stomped over to Indra and waved the wrinkled page in her face, “This is a joke, tell me this is a joke!?”

Indra flicked her eyes to the once-shiny page ripped from a centuries-old magazine and said nothing. There was an ad for perfume on the other side of the page, promising eternal love or something. Everyone in the ad was half-naked so it didn’t make much sense, but there was a perfume bottle in the foreground so, probably the two things were connected. He was dying to know how the hell something like this was found without any water damage or decay to speak of at all, the smallest most selfish part of his brain wondering if there was more where this came from, but there were more pressing issues to deal with. 

“ _If_ ,” he conceded for the sake of argument. No one was really arguing with him, he was mostly stomping around yelling at dead air at the moment, but that didn’t matter. “ _If_ I had… six months. A year? If I had a practice go. Extra fabric. If I had something other than two months and scraps I could maybe… _where the hell are you going?!_ ”

Reese whimpered behind him. 

Indra raised one eyebrow, “I’ll tell her parents that it will be ready.”

Bellamy watched her walk away and wished for the third time in an hour that throwing something at her head wouldn’t breach a half-dozen points in Wells’ well-crafted peace treaty. When he turned back around, Reese looked on the verge of tears and Mel’s hands were bunched up into tight little fists. 

“What?” he didn’t mean to sound suspicious, but when it came to these two, generally whatever he _thought_ was the issue was the least of his worries. 

“You hurt her feelings,” Mal ground out. She may be small enough for him to flip over his shoulder the way he could when Octavia was that age, but she was constantly at Echo’s side and he had seen her ground a boy around her age and twice her size into the dust without breaking a sweat. 

“Indra?” he gestured to the retreating woman, confused. “I highly doubt that.”

A tear slipped down Reese’s cheek. 

_Shit._

“Hey now, hey hey heeyyy,” he crouched down in front of them and tried to use the soothing tone he had mastered for when Raven or Octavia was pissed at him, which was more often lately than normal. He was fucking ready for this party to be fucking over. 

He was greeted with a finger jabbing him harshly in the chest. 

“You don’t think we can do this!?” Reese’s voice reached an unbearable pitch when she was trying not to scream. He had asked her not to scream and the results were worse than before, but there was no going back now. She was very good at following instructions. 

“No? No, that’s not what I said?” He wobbled on his toes as she pushed the center of his chest with her finger again. 

“You don’t _trust us_! You think we’re stupid and we can’t do this?!”

“Reese, honey? _I_ can’t do this,” he shoved the scrap of paper at her and pointed to it. “I have no idea how to even start.”

“ _We can do this_ ,” Mel said fiercely, putting her arm around Reese’s shoulders and glaring down at him. 

Bellamy forced himself to smile up at them, “Sure. You’re right. We can.”

“Together,” Reese whispered. Ninety percent of the time she was a pretty calm, diminutive sort of person, slipping through the cracks and always hovering in the places where no one looked. She knew more about the village than anyone else because no one saw her. Bellamy was half-afraid of what would happen if she ever figured out how to use all the secrets that she knew. 

His smile broadened and he held out his hand, palm down, “Together.” They placed their hands on top of his, first Mel with a scowl and then Reese, more hesitantly, with a shy smile. 

“I know you think that that Peter kid has his eyes set on Wells’ job,” Bellamy whispered in Raven’s ear later that day, “but I’d put my money on Mel and Reese.” There was a note of pride in his voice that he really hoped neither girl ever heard. He didn’t need it going to their heads. 

Raven rolled her eyes. 

Of course it was going to be Mel and Reese that led the village when Wells no longer could. That was the whole reason why Wells had gently nudged them towards Bellamy’s table. 

Bellamy was the only one under the impression that Wells was the true leader of their village, everyone knew that the voice that mattered held a needle and thread in his hands and had two tiny but very scary teenage girls learning at his knee. 

Anyone that banked on Peter’s constant pattering around at Wells’ heels as a sign of things to come were going to be supremely disappointed. Raven was confident that none of their own people were so easily duped by Peter’s politician smile and soft hands, but outsiders might, and that kept Reese and Mel safe in Bellamy’s hands. Whether he knew it or not. 

 

Bellamy crawled over Raven as quietly as possible and groped around in the dark for his pants. Or her pants. It was the middle of the night and it didn’t much matter, he just didn’t fancy walking out to their latrine _completely_ naked. 

He had bad luck in that department. 

Raven could run across the clearing, steal Fox’s breakfast, and burrow back under the covers right on the cusp of daybreak naked as the day she was born and no one but he would be the wiser. The one time - _one time_ \- Bellamy dared dash out of the tent in the middle of the night, he ran smack dab into Jones heading back to his tent after guard duty. Even Sachel heard about it. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Raven’s raspy voice cut through the air. 

“Pants,” he whispered back. “Go back to sleep.”

“Why the fuck do you need pants right fucking now?”

Bellamy paused and grinned in the direction of the slightly more shadowy blob that was Raven, “Why the fuck are you so fucking ornery at night? Can’t a guy just find his fucking pants in fucking peace?”

Something soft hit his head.

“There’s your goddamn pants, prick.”

He stood up and shoved his legs in and slid the pants over his hips. They fit a little more loosely than they did before, he was losing weight. They both were. This winter wasn’t as cold, but the previous harvest had been damaged and there wasn’t as much to go around. He could feel Raven’s spine, little ridges proving in a too-painful way that there were bones under her skin and not bands of smooth steel. 

“I love you, too,” he said to the air before throwing a shirt over his head and ducking outside. His boots were waiting for him just beside the door, his jacket slung over the chair on the porch. 

It was unseasonably warm for February, too dry. Monty had very dark things to say about that, he paced around with his hands behind his back, talking in a low voice to Harper and Lincoln, holding soil in his hands and looking grim. 

Bellamy trotted off to check the traps he had set up on the banks of the river with Lincoln the night before. He had too much on his plate to do it later and Lincoln had a trip out to another village planned for that day. Bellamy looked up at the sky, chances were Lincoln was already on his way, or at the least they’d cross paths. 

When he returned, chasing the sunrise into the house, Raven was sitting up in bed, arms crossed over her chest, a scowl on her face. 

“Hey,” he said cheerfully. “Do you know where we got these pants?”

“Where the fuck were you?”

“I’m serious,” Bellamy shrugged out of the pants – that were, after a few minutes of walking, clearly Raven’s and not his – and tossed them on the bed. They were nothing like what she had been wearing when she came down in that rusty tin can, softer than any of the fabric they’d had on the Ark. Maybe he’d made them out of something he got from a Grounder, but he couldn’t remember. 

“Why did you steal my pants?”

“I couldn’t find mine,” he dug another pair of pants out from under the bed and put them on over his boots. Better. He eyed Raven’s form through the blanket appraisingly. “I think your hips are getting wider as you get older.”

“Good fucking morning to you, too, asshole,” she grumbled back, lying back against the pillows with a sigh. 

Bellamy looked around, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, “Hey where are those pants… you know the one?”

“Nope.”

“Sure,” he disappeared under the bed, tossing clothes around undiscriminatingly. “The ones I came down in.”

“The black ones? The guard fabric?” Raven smacked his ass playfully. 

He popped up, grinning, “Yeah.”

She leaned over and took his face between her hands, smooshing his cheeks around a little, “You’re way too cheerful in the morning. Is there any way to make it stop?”

Bellamy sighed and shook his head, “I can’t help it. Waking up next to you every day? It just lifts me up, baby.” He grinned and gave her a sloppy smack of a kiss before she could shove him away. “Where are they?”

“Your balls?”

“My pants?”

Raven rolled her eyes, “They died two winters ago. You made them into a vest for Sachel.”

Bellamy sorted the clothes he’d flung across the floor, fingering each piece as he did so. 

There was a scrap of the red from Raven’s jacket lining the collar of one of his shirts. Bits and pieces of the old guard uniform popped up here and there patching holes or reinforcing the knees or elbows of something new. He looked at the small pile of items and frowned. 

Nothing was left of the Ark. 

Had they really been there that long?

“Hey idiot?” Raven was watching him curiously, her clunky metal brace in one hand. He shifted across the floor and went through the motions of putting each piece in place. 

Afterwards, he placed a kiss on her kneecap and looked up at her solemnly. 

“You look like you’re about to tell me that you’re pregnant or that John finally moved back to Camp Jaha,” she frowned down at him.

“Which news would you like more?”

Raven tilted her head, “I don’t know. I think you’d be kinda cute with a little belly and swollen ankles.”

Bellamy raised himself up on his feet, bending at the waist as he did so that they stayed face-to-face, “Jones…” he paused and took a breath. “Is _not_ moving to Jaha.”

“ _Damn_ ,” losing John to Jaha was on the top of her wish list every New Year. Her eyes narrowed, “Who is the father? Is it Miller? It can’t be Miller. It’s Jones, isn’t it? I’ll kill him.”

They broke into giggles at the same moment and somewhere in the middle of it, he kissed the tip of her nose, and she ended up in his arms as he spun around the room. 

 

“What is it?” Raven wrinkled her nose at the mound of fabric in Mel’s hands. The younger girl made a face and Bellamy slid between them quickly, a bright smile plastered on his face. 

“It’s a wedding dress!”

Somewhere behind him Reese whimpered. He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them to find Raven’s face wrinkled in confusion. 

“Act excited,” he hissed as quietly as he could, mostly just mouthing the words to Raven and hoping for the best. She plastered a bright smile on her face and leaned a little to see Reese behind his shoulder.

“Oh wow! Can I… see it?” 

Bellamy whirled around and nodded to Mel encouragingly, who dimpled and let the dress fall to the ground as she held it up by the shoulders. 

“ _Great_ , isn’t it?” Bellamy nudged Raven with his elbow. 

“It’s… really _something_!” she exclaimed. 

The next few minutes were a blur of Mel and Reese babbling excitedly, showing Raven the original picture they’d had to work off of, regaling her with every minute detail of the creative process, leaving in a whirlwind of tulle and giggles. In the aftermath, Raven plunked down on her workbench and took a deep breath. 

“Yeah…” he finally said, rubbing his face with his hands in frustration. “We did the best we could. The girls were awesome, actually.”

“It looks…” Raven swallowed. “It actually _looks_ like the picture.”

“I just hope this doesn’t cause some… wait. What?”

She looked up at him, her face a little pale, “Holy shit, Bell? It’s kind of amazing.”

“You’re joking,” he stepped towards her. “It’s monstrous.”

Raven shrugged, “It looks like the picture. You did what they asked. I can’t believe it.”

Bellamy stared at her. 

“Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it. And I don’t even _want_ to know what it’s made of. But you fucking pulled it off and—”

The rest of what she had to say was lost to a fit of laughter as Bellamy buried his face in her neck, nibbling softly on her sensitive skin. 

 

The village became more established over the years, and visits to and from Camp Jaha became more and less frequent. More for everyone in general, for trade, for family, for gossip, for dating, for anything really; less for any specific diplomatic reason, less for them. As a rule, Bellamy avoided the ten-mile trek whenever he could and if Raven was going to leave the village, she preferred visiting one of the nearby Grounder villages, even if the closest was nearly twice the distance away. 

But, when Reese and Mel had their hearts set on something, Bellamy was the last person capable of refusing them. Which is how he ended up chaperoning a group of about fifteen teenagers out to Camp Jaha for a small festival. He’d somehow sweet-talked Sachel away from Raven for a couple of days. 

“There’ll be no living with him when he gets back,” Raven grumbled darkly to herself. Mel’s request for a trading trip had turned into a three-day excursion which left Raven on her own and not a little bit grouchy about it. 

“Are you grumbling about Bellamy or Sachel?” Wells peered in at her from the doorway, a smile on his face. “I don’t think that poor kid has had a single day off since you so magnanimously took him under your wing.”

Raven didn’t even spare him a glance, “ _You_ threw him into my tent and he refused to leave.”

“He’d been loitering around outside it for a month waiting for an invite,” Wells said conversationally, staying outside. “Come hang out with me today.”

Raven looked up at him like he’d lost his mind, “I have a million things to do and Bell—“

“Bellamy is gone and so are all the teenagers, which means most people are taking the day off. I hear Octavia and Fox are organizing a swimming lesson down at the river for the kids even.” Raven grumbled under her breath and Wells just laughed. “Come on, asshole. Spend the day with me.”

“What do you want to do?”

Wells twinkled, “Well… Nate was telling me that there’s this thing you do for Bellamy that he wants you to… okay, okay, I’m joking!” He held up his hands in defense as she started throwing her boots at him. 

“Bring those back to me.”

“Only if you promise not to be violent for a full twenty-four hours.”

“You know I can’t promise that.”

He walked across the floor and knelt down in front of her, reaching up to tighten one of the straps on her brace, “Take it out on a tree next time.”

She cocked her head at the soft tone in his voice, “What’s wrong oh wise one?”

Wells rocked back on his heels and smiled ruefully, “I … sometimes I forget… about…” he gestured towards her leg in embarrassment. “When you sprained your wrist last year, he - Bellamy - he said something about how it always surprises him that you don’t have metal for bones.”

That didn’t quite capture the frantic fear that went through Bellamy when Jones interrupted them to report Raven had been injured. When it came to Raven, Bellamy had the ability to go from zero to a thousand in a split second. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her to take care of herself; he just had a deep-seeded mistrust of the universe. 

It was something Wells and Bellamy always agreed on. 

“Trust me,” she grunted, pulling on her boots. “My bones are the same as yours.”

He stood and held out his hand to haul her up, “Come on, old bones. Time to take a day off. I promise the world won’t end.”

Raven smiled and took his hand, “Where are you taking me?”

Wells winked, “It’s a surprise.”

There were two horses waiting for them outside. On any other day, Raven would have resented this, but the thought of walking out to the stables and then riding fuck knew where after the week she’d had. Wanting to stay in the comfort of her worktent had more to do with general fatigue and the haunting ache in her lower back that warned her of an impending period. John’s general incompetence had kept her on her feet more than she would have liked that week and she really had been looking forward to a day alone at her worktable, fiddling with experiments that she didn’t want Sachel to know were doomed to fail. 

It was just so damn hard to say no to Wells and the ass knew it. 

 

 

She was glaring at him mutinously as he slowly became aware of how much attention they had brought on themselves. It took him no time at all to realize that their little audience wasn’t going to turn the tide in his favor. 

Bellamy stepped forward slowly, a forced smile splitting his cheeks, “Let’s talk about this later?” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Miller assessing them with hooded eyes, shaking his head at something Jones was trying to whisper in his ear. Fox had that look she gets when the betting pool was hot and Monty’s eyes kept shifting back and forth between them like he wasn’t sure whether to interfere. 

Raven’s eyes flicked to something or someone over his shoulder and her expression darkened. 

Bellamy closed his eyes, _it better fucking not be Wells_.

She hissed something like _fine_ or _whatever_ and then stomped back into her worktent. Inside, something crashed and a few seconds later, Sachel came darting out, pausing only to shoot Bellamy a particularly accusatory expression before disappearing into the near-silent crowd of onlookers. 

He turned on his heel to find Wells standing behind him, a smirk on his face, arms crossed over his chest. Bellamy tightened his shoulders and stormed off before he said something he’d regret. 

 

The thing about Raven is that she’s a fighter. 

He can walk away and hope that she cools off on her own, taking the very real risk that she’ll work herself up into being three times as pissed off by the time you come back. 

He can confront her, fight it out, spitting and screaming until she wins or she breaks or they both say something stupid and she starts laughing.

He can try to squish the fight out of her. Literally this has only worked once. She gouged a hunk out of his arms the next time he tried it. But once, just once, he pulled her into his lap and held on until the rage was gone. 

He can tease her, laugh, poke at her until she’s laughing, too. This has never really worked for Bellamy. It is the only ploy Wells has to use ever, so he has hope that one day it will actually work for him, too. 

Sometimes, rarely and never too often so that she notices, he can send Monty or Harper in and they work some kind of magic on her mood, wheedling her in soft tones. 

With Raven, fighting is inevitable, it’s shouting at the top of your lungs in the eye of the storm. 

Bellamy looks down at his hands and sighs. 

 

The thing about Bellamy is that he’s not a fighter. 

She can ignore his bristling anger until he finally simmers himself out or confronts her in frustration, leaving the door open so that she can redirect the argument into his hands. 

She can get in his face, hissing and shouting at him until he responds. 

She can send him out into the forest with Lincoln on some trumped up pretense and accept that he’ll return a bit more pensive but a lot less stressed and she may never know what got him riled up in the first place. 

She can make passive aggressive comments in front of the others until Monroe or Miller finally says something and he apologizes in his soft way. 

She can tease him and pick at him until he finally snaps and she can latch onto that thread and pull it out as far as it will go, leaning into his aggression that he keeps so tightly wound. 

Or, she can pick a fight with him in front of everyone, watch Fox take their bets, and then wait. 

 

She can’t even pretend to be surprised when he ducks into her worktent less than five minutes later. 

 

“You’re alive?!” Monty looked up at him in surprise later that afternoon. 

Bellamy blinked. Behind him, Miller choked back a laugh. 

“Oh man,” Monty patted his arm. “I totally thought you were dead.”

Bellamy tried not to take offense that Monty had clearly bet against him. 

 

“Do you think… nevermind.”

Raven rolled her eyes, “Just ask.”

Bellamy propped himself on his elbow and peered down at her, “Do you think … if we … could I take you in a fight?” He paused, “Not that I would. But put us in a ring and … I could take you.”

“Oh sweetie,” Raven’s voice dripped with false concern. “No.”

He should have seen that coming. She never calls him sweetie. 

He leaned down and kissed her because she’s lying there looking up at him like she expects him to. 

Hell, he’d probably bet against himself, if he was being honest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this *should* have been the conclusion, but I've hit a writing block like I've never known in my life with this fic and so I'm posting the 'end' in two parts - most of this I wrote months ago. I know the ending so it shouldn't be too much longer to get that going and finished. 
> 
> sorry sorry sorry this is taking so long to update. I didn't forget about it, I promise.


End file.
